BBC To 'Start Using SEO..'

God forbid, but that juggernaut of the digital world, the good old BBC, is just about to start applying search engine optimisation to it's content!

With in excess of 3 million pages on their website you would have thought they would have been satisfied with the dominance they have already achieved. But like all good marketers they declare that they are making changes in order to meet the needs of their users and are about to start optimising their headlines.

You can read the the full post from Steve Herrmann, the BBC's Sports Editor to get the details but, in essence, they are breaking away from a 33 character headline imposed on them by the old Ceefax system and will start to write 2 headlines. One will comply with the old system and fit neatly on their front page for visitor navigation while a fuller, longer headline will adorn the actual subject page.

With the ability to refer to full names and details in the page headline they are clearly moving into long tail keywords that can be very specific in search engines. Equally, for those who have read my advice on search engine optimisation, the headline of the piece becomes the website page title where it is easily found by the search engines.

However, there is no reason to feel downhearted by this awakening of the BBC beast. As small entrepreneurs, we are always able to move quicker and more effectively than the big gorillas of the web.

The Permalink created when you publish a post or page can also be edited after the event just the same as the BBC is proposing to do and with exactly the same effect.

The last part of the Permalink, often referred to as; 'the slug' can be edited to closely relate to a tight subject area of your keywords. Meanwhile the post title can make use of the longtail keywords and keyword phrases just the same as the longer headlines now in prospect on the BBC site.

Edit the permalink slug

But wait, there's more!

Clever use of your SEO plugin will also enable you to rewrite the title, description and keywords of every post that you publish. Now, I am no great enthusiast of this method as I believe you are rapidly losing your marketing direction in the technical forest when you go down this road.

But there appears to be evidence that a carefully written description that is concise and uses the same keywords that you are targeting in your title may well be picked up and used by Google as the 'snippet' of content published in the free listing below the title and above the URL.

Once made visible by Google in this way then if you have made it attractive and compelling for the human visitor then you may well get more organic search clicks as a result.

So as a niche marketer I'm not too concerned by the BBC finally switching on to the benefits of SEO. I'm not after their market, thank heavens(!) and I've already got great tools in the form of Wordpress and its plugins to give me all the advantage I need in my niche market.