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.

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WordPress is a very powerful tool for this purpose as it releases the marketer from all the hassles of managing a website and frees them to do what is most important, marketing.

I heard Alex Mandossian in a teleseminar several years ago say that if you are not spending 95% of your time marketing your product or service then you are doomed to failure.

But WordPress is not set up correctly straight out of the box to be most effective.  Indeed, in may ways it is very ineffective.  So stage two of the content here on NicheMarketBlogger.com is a series of lessons on the simple but critical steps necessary to make your new blog 'search engine friendly'.

Friendly search engine spiders!

There are no great technical marvels here – just plain common sense on how to run a tight ship so that the search engine spiders find it a clean and efficient place when they come visiting.

That's really the point.  The search engines have a massive task these days to crawl and index the whole of the internet and any site which is built in clean and efficient code, well organised and documented is going to enable the spiders to be in and out in minimum time.  And in the long term they are going to reward you for that.

Then how you write your content also has a massive effect on your search engine ranking.  But more of that later.

So make sure that your niche marketing blog is search engine friendly.  Hop over to Make My Blog Search Engine Friendly to find out how.

Bruce Bird

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Your website, written in html code, sat there fat, dumb and happy and nobody came to look at it including the search engine spiders – because nobody had told them that your site existed.

So you had to submit your site to the search engines who were themselves inundated with the task of reviewing and indexing thousands of sites.  So everything about getting your site indexed was long, slow and laborious.

In my last post I told you of the first reason you no longer have to worry about this.  Because your RSS feed plugged in to your personal pages hosted on the search engines is very quickly going to be found by the SE spiders which will rapidly scuttle down the feed, check you out and report back to mother that there's a new boy on the block.

The second reason is the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.  This creates a Google sitemap and holds it ready on your site for when the spiders come to call.  So every time you make a change on your site the sitemap is updated.

When you hit the Publish button your WordPress blog pings the Update Services who ping the search engines.  The search engine spiders come calling and are quietly presented with an up-to-date sitemap as they come through the door.

So, in effect, the process has been completely reversed from where it was some years ago.  Instead of having to create a sitemap from time to time and submit it to numerous search engines now the Google Sitemap plugin keeps it up-to-date automatically and the spiders collect it when they arrive.

And then the killer.  For some time those in the know have promoted the use of a single Update Service from Feedburner.com on the basis that multiple update services were only going to confuse the issue and potentially get you blacklisted.  And then Google came along, bought up Feedburner and turned it into a Google service.

So now with a single update service from Feedburner you are actually pinging Google direct to tell them about any new content you post.

Isn't technology wonderful?

Bruce Bird

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Hey! Look at me!

It is everyone's wish to get their WordPress blog website noticed and indexed by the search engines just as quickly as possible.

There are some urban myths around that this is hard work and you have to submit your site to the search engines.

This myth is often perpetuated by hosting and website design companies as a means of extracting more of your precious money out of your pocket.  However, WordPress has two great features that make search engine submission completely unnecessary.

First is the RSS feed built in to your WordPress blog is intended to tell people about your new content. So why not tell yourself – but do it somewhere that the search engines will definitely notice?

Go sign up for your personal page on iGoogle, My.Yahoo and MSN.  These are completely free and allow you to assemble on one page all sorts of information that you may find interesting.

Now why would these big companies provide such a service?  Because they want to know what you are interested in, of course, so that they can target specific advertising to you while you are on-line.  You may not be interested in their advertising but you are certainly interested in taking advantage of this feature.

Then ask yourself how they assemble the information you have selected onto your page?  They do this by taking the RSS feed from the services you select.

But the real gem is that they also allow you to add your own selection of RSS feeds.  So simply add the RSS feed from your own blog to your own personal pages.  Do this on the three biggest players of Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Then ask yourself how they know what you are reading on your personal page?  Answer;  because they are spidering these personal pages constantly to find out what the latest and greatest trends might be.

So there you have it.  The search engines give you the tool to tell them automatically of any new site that you build – and keep on telling them as long as you keep adding new content.

I'll tell you the other reason you don't need to submit your niche market WordPress blog to the search engines tomorrow.

Bruce Bird

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