More Big Companies Adopt Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practice
From today, the headlines of the BBC News website will become longer to make its stories easier to find on search engines.
“We estimate that about 29% of BBC News website UK traffic comes from search engines.”, says Steve Herrmann, editor of BBC News website.
The BBC will therefore allow its journalists to create two headlines for a story. While the shorter one between 31 and 33 characters appears on the front page and the website indexes as well as on mobile phones, the longer one – up to 55 characters will appear on the story itself – and in search engine results.
Search engine optimisation has become a standard practice for most online organisations over the past couple of years. As users began to find stories more and more via search engines or Google News, via personal recommendations on social media or in email, via links on Twitter or their RSS readers, news publishers wanted to be sure of reaching them.
“The practice of ’search engine optimisation’ – making content in such a way that it is easily retrieved via search engines – is an important area for us and for others across the web,” explained Steve Herrmann to the BBC news users in a blogpost.
So does the justification damage the use of language? Or does it only stop journalists from inventing too complex phrases that were not understandable anyway? Since search-optimised headlines will tend to include all the key words a user might type in when he or she is searching for a topic, the headlines may even be more useful.
In fact, in the news sector, the changes are minimal – as the BBC shows in an example: “Possible counter-bid for Cadbury” becomes “Ferrero and Hershey in possible counter-bid for Cadbury”. Might be a bit harder to scan on a front page, but the longer headline is definitely more informative.
