If ever you wanted evidence that SEO is not only effective, but mainstream, you need look no further than the BBC News website.
In a blog post published yesterday, Steve Herrman explained that individual news story pages will now be able to have slightly longer titles (up to 55 characters) than the ones used on the BBC News front page (limited to 33 characters), or other indexes. Giving examples, he wrote:
...the difference between a longer and shorter headline version might be as simple as: "Queen's speech: Brown draws election battle lines" instead of "Brown draws election battle lines". Or "Possible counter-bid for Cadbury" might become "Ferrero and Hershey in possible counter-bid for Cadbury".
It'll also be easier for journalists to include full names eg "Janet Jackson blames doctor for Michael's death" instead of "Doctor 'responsible' says Jackson".
The move has been designed to give search engines - and readers - more information on individual pages. The longer headlines will allow BBC News to put selected keywords into them, helping stories to rank higher in the search engines than before.
It's a simple technique, but it's an effective one. If you would like us to put it to work for you - along with other search engine optimisation techniques - then please get in touch.
