Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Dennis R. Mortensen, former director of data insights at Yahoo and founder of Visual Revenue, a New York firm that sells its predictive-analytics services to news organizations.

Dennis saw my talk at the Canadian Journalism Foundation in January and wanted to comment on the role of a news site’s front page in its success in assembling an audience. He argues that paying too much attention to SEO on current articles could backfire on news orgs.

In Josh’s talk in Toronto, he hypothesized that:

[The front page is] still an enormously powerful engine of traffic. I would say actually that for most American newspapers…it’s probably 70 percent in a lot of cases.

Josh is saying you should view the front page as a traffic channel unto itself, just as you’d think of Facebook or Google — something I wholeheartedly agree with. If you choose to view your front page as a traffic channel, you’ll also sign up for a different kind of data analysis — analysis that mixes external referrers with internal referrers. In other words, a link from the Drudge Report is no different than a link from your own front page, in the sense that they both should be viewed as channels to optimize.

I argue that the front page is the most important engine of traffic for news media publishers today. I would also argue that this whole notion of news media publishers being held hostage by Google — and the slightly suboptimal idea of optimizing your articles for search to begin with — is somewhat misguided. It certainly seems wrong when we look at the data.

In this analysis, it’s important to distinguish between two core segments: current article views and archived article views. To begin, I’ve chosen a set of very strict and non-favorable definitions to my conclusion. A current article is defined as an item of content that is directly being exposed on the front or section front page right now. Any other content not currently exposed on a front page or section front page is deemed to be an archived article.

We looked at a sample of about 10 billion article views, across a sample of Visual Revenue clients, and found that on any given day, 64 percent of views are on current articles, and 36 percent of views are on archived articles.

So on a typical day, for most if not all news media publishers, the largest portion of article views comes off of their current article segment — stories published today or perhaps yesterday and still being actively promoted. I find this analysis fascinating and almost empowering, for the simple reason that most current news events are initially non-searchable. If a revolution breaks out in Egypt, I won’t know until I’m told about it. Non-searchable translates into a need for the stories to be discoverable by the reader in a different way, such as on a front page, through RSS, or in their social stream — all channels the publisher either owns or can influence.

There is no doubt that search, as a channel, owns the archive. One can discuss the data of why that is and why it is or isn’t optimal — I’ll leave that for a later discussion. But today, let’s focus on the current article segment, by far the bigger of the two. Where do those views come from? Looking at the same dataset from our clients, we get a very clear indication of where one’s focus should lie:

Sources of current article views:

78 percent come from front pages
7 percent come from search
6 percent come from social media
5 percent come from news aggregators
3 percent come from news originators
1 percent come from RSS & email

(We’re defining “news originators” as sites where at least two-thirds of the stories excerpted and promoted on their front page are original pieces generated by the news organization — which includes most traditional media. “News aggregators” are sites where less than two-thirds are original, such as Google News, Techmeme, or Drudge.)

I doubt this front-page dominance is much of a surprise to most editors — but for some reason, it seems like we aren’t taking the appropriate action today. We have 78 percent of all views on current articles coming from the front page — that’s 49 percent of all your article views on any given day — and what do we do to optimize it? And why is it that so many news organizations think immediately of search when we write a new story, when search has minimal initial impact? Even worse, writing an SEO-optimized article excerpt title for your front page probably deoptimizes your results on current articles.

The front page is indeed still an enormously powerful engine of traffic. We now know that about half of your article views can be attributed to the primary front page or the section front pages — and with it a huge chunk of any news organization’s online revenue. The question, then, is what kind of processes and optimization methodologies have you applied to take advantage of this fact?