The BBC’s SEO
Dec 8th, 2009 by handolio
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always thought that the BBC News website could do with a lift in the search engines. After all, the site just never appears in the search results and hardly seems to get any traffic.
Anyway, as editor Steve Herrmann explained in November, the BBC is finally embracing some basic SEO practices in a bid to “make it easier to find our stories if you are somewhere else”. God help the competition.
Steve’s post is entirely reasonable, of course, as is the corporation’s move. The examples he highlights are all cases where the longer headline is useful, or at least inoffensive, but I wondered when I read it how it would play out in practice.
To be honest, I’d forgotten all about it until last night, when I discovered a story where the new practice jarred: “Man charged over James Murray Belfast balcony death”. It’s not hateful, but it’s an example of what happens when keywords make their presence felt.
Interestingly, the BBC’s URL structure still doesn’t include keywords. Introducing them would also help the stories rank, and nobody would ever notice or care.
I would notice and care if the BBC introduced keywords into URLs. Specifically, I would be able to see what a story was about before clicking through to it, which would be useful.
In any case, I think this beats the old ‘exam girl smash death tragedy’ nonsense headlines they used to have. I assumed they were keyword optimising gone mad. If not, what were they for?
I’ve noticed this a lot recently on the BBC Sport’s online tennis coverage. This evening I’ve clicked on a sidebar link snappily titled ‘Henman on Murray’ and found myself looking at a page entitled ‘Tim Henman on Andrew Murray’s victory over Rafael Nadal’.
I’d have to work really hard to work myself into any kind of lather about this. As handolio says, it’s a relatively inoffensive kind of SEO play. But it’s a bit naff isn’t it? A kind of ‘beiging’ of editorial.
Ok, I may find this content according to the keywords I’ve just Googled; but if they keep this up, the BBC’s brand pull in the search results will start to wane in the face of more charismatic alternatives.