Further SEO efforts from the BBC?
Late last year, the BBC introduced SEO to their site by extending the title tags on their individual news story pages. Next up, they are releasing a new site in beta – they say the reason why is navigation but whilst that is true, I think it’s to assist their SEO efforts as opposed to “easier and faster access to the most popular sites across the BBC “.
Here is the existing site:
Where let’s be honest, it’s not exactly hard to find News, Sport or Weather – even less so if you’ve gone all bespoke on it. Following the link to the new Beta site takes you here:
Other than the absence of the clock, the only real difference (as they’ve pointed out) is the navigation. I’m always one for keyword rich links making up your main navigation so opting for this new top menu would suggest to me they’re starting to implement good SEO practice across their sites. They actually do rank no.1 for the terms “news”, “sport” and “weather” but the original changes to title tags would suggest they’re keen to get good practice SEO going on. Perhaps with Rupert Murdoch wanting news to kept from the reaches of Google, they’ve spotted an opportunity to ensure maximum exposure for the free to read content on their website.
Whilst on the subject of the BBC, a competitor to iPlayer has been launched in the form of MSN Video Player. The reason I mention this, I like the message you see when viewed in Google Chrome that tells you to get a better browser:
Bit cheeky? Maybe, but I like it.
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Just For Fun – Pest Control
Email attachments don’t come as think and fast as they used to, guess that with such content being more commonly shared across Facebook and Twitter, they are slowly becoming a thing of the past. However, I got this one from my luddite brother yesterday who still uses email as his primary online social tool and thought I’d share it with you:
Pest Control
1 – kill some flies
2 – allow them to dry for an hour in the sun
3 – take a pencil and paper and let you imagination go
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Our #seofilms Poster Entry
There has been a bit of a buzz of late on Twitter for those involved in SEO, it started off with members off #mancseo listing film titles that sound vaguely like SEO terms – this soon caught on and before long the #seofilms and #ppcfilms started trending, as if to suggest our industry is full of geeks.
A list of the “best entries” was covered by SEOptimise’s 12 SEO Blockbusters blog entry, then, to raise the bar somewhat, Search Engine Watch has introduced an SEO movie poster competition.
Not wanting this opportunity to combine my love of HTML, film and Photoshop to pass me by, I came up with the following:
That should disspel any rumours of geeks in our industry if nothing else.
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Google Maps – New Features in Labs!
Google are rolling out yet more ‘Labs’ features this week. In the past, the term ‘Labs Project’ was an acronym for, ‘we’re really not sure about this, but we’ve spent a fair bit of time (and money on it) so seeing as we’ve come this far we might as well see what people think of it.’ A cool, web 2.0 way of saying ‘Beta’.
Now however, a lot of sites have bolt-on ‘labs’ full of great features that well surpass the efforts of old. Most ‘labs’ projects are genuinely innovative and having a ‘lab’ area to test them in makes perfect sense. As with most things on the web today, the Google lab is one of, if not the best.
Their latest lab project involves their other new toy, Google Maps. Maps are starting to take over the search results pages so it is probably only natural that they are looking to add new functionality to this area. The new ‘lab’ features for Google maps are being rolled out selectively, you’ll know if you can access them if you see an icon like the one shown below when you are in Google Maps:
If you see this, then you are in business! If you don’t, you’re not going to be getting a Christmas card from Google this year!
If you click this link, all of the new features are shown, including, Drag ‘n’ Zoom (my personal favourite), Aerial Imagery – giving a new perspective for those cool aerial shots and a latitude / longitude tooltip – great for those who use sat nav a lot and need to know how to get somewhere off the beaten track. There’s a screen shot of this in action below:
There is also the option to add a ‘Beta’ badge to the Google logo – I guess we’re not completely away from the old days just yet…
Try the features out (if you can) and let us know what you think? If nothing else this is another indicator of Google’s shift towards local search and its growing importance in the search results pages.
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Is Social Media A Fad?
Down at SES London this week I attended a talk by @lisadmyers on Social Media. It was a very informative session which I’ll leave to SEOChicks to cover the ins and outs of, but I did want to share this video which she played to show just how big Social Media has become:
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