Category Archives: SEO

Kerry Katona, medication, This Morning and 10,000 people in the wrong place

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Why did over 10,000 people watch this video on YouTube today (don’t be fooled by the screenshot*, click Play to see something involving a Gordon Brown speech and washing)?

Because over 100,000 people watched this one:

And the title of the first video? “kerry katona drunk today this morning live on phil and fern sleeping medications new body”.

(*YouTube uses a screenshot from the very middle frame of every video. Whoever produced this was savvy enough to include a shot of Schofield and Katona at that point)

Clever, and rather anarchic, use of SEO.

Meanwhile, Mr Paparazzi have a real scoop of sorts with the video above – the most discussed on YouTube today. Candi from the site tells me she

“Wasn’t watching at the time but tracked it down on another website and after some crafty work managed to download a suitable file to upload to You Tube.

“If you search Kerry on You Tube you’ll see I did the same when she was on GMTV a few months ago. It’s all about being one step ahead. Get up there first, get found first.”

Updates to come tomorrow.

(PS: Apologies if you came across this blog post looking for something else.)

40,000 hits: why news websites should make more of cartoons (and infographics)

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Blogging cartoon in Romanian

Blogging cartoon in Romanian

Blogging cartoon in Arabic

A couple weeks ago I published the ‘5 Stages of a Blogger’s Life‘ cartoon, drawn by Alex Hughes. It was an experiment to test a theory of mine: that cartoons could be particularly successful in increasing news website visitor numbers, and that news organisations should be doing more with them.

The results? In one week that cartoon got over 40,000 hits, making it the most popular single post ever on the Online Journalism Blog . Continue reading →

Reasons not to ignore comments #2: The Daily Mail and Julie Moult

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UPDATE: A response from the Daily Mail’s Martin Clarke: “comments on the article in question were not published, because the story was already a few days old … If you want to complain about a story some days after it’s published you have to take a more traditional view of things and write to the editor”

I’ve blogged before about the problem with ignoring comments. But recently “marketing man gone native” blog Bloggerheads has been providing a rather stronger case.

Julie Moult is a journalist who wrote a particularly poorly informed non-story for the Daily Mail about UK MP Hazel Blears being Googlebombed (in short, Blears wasn’t Googlebombed at all: the top result for her name just happened to be a humorous image). Continue reading →

“Journalists are cheap” – SEO and why newspapers should cut out the middlemen

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Last weekend I attended the first WordCamp UK – a conference for WordPress-using bloggers, developers and designers. Aside from the tips on plugins, backups and content management systems, one line stood out for me “If you’re a web developer get to know a journalist. We need them. And they’re cheap.” Continue reading →

Update your news article online? Not if Google News has anything to do with it.

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The Google News Blog has posted on some truths and myths about its ranking systems (via Cowbite) – and this one caught my eye:

“Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE
Currently, the Google News crawler only visits each article URL once. If you make updates to the article after we’ve crawled it, they won’t be reflected on our site. We hope that soon we’ll have the ability to re-crawl your articles to make sure we have the latest version displayed on our site, but for now this is not the case.”

In other words, the commercial pressure here is not to update a single article, but to instead create new ones with the new information (there is already an imperative here in that this increases your page count stats).

I’m not sure if this is a bad thing (errors go uncorrected?) or good (twitter-style newsrivers?). Continue reading →