Every Page Is A Home Page
March 27th, 2008 — adminUpdate: Jeff Langevin, who is one of Internet Broadcasting SEO experts, had some thoughts on this post. Rather than breaking them out separately, I’m adding them into the original post, in italics.
We’ve posted several times here on State Of Local about the need to make every page on your web site a home page. In other words, every page of your site should offer clear navigation to the other parts of your site and to the things you think would be of the most interest.
While that seems pretty intuitive, it’s not always an easy case to make to people at a local level. The traditional media model is all about the front page or opening news segment. But the web is much more random, and it’s impossible to dictate how visitors are going to access your web site.
One example of that problem is a new feature being offered up on Google. A visitor searching for a specific web site is frequently being offered not just the home page, but also a number of internal pages that Google’s search function believes visitors are most interested in seeing. Google also includes a search box that offers the chance to search the web site directly in Google.
As you can see from this example featuring local Twin Cities TV station KARE-11, there are a couple of problems with Google’s approach. The first is that it may be suggesting pages that are not helpful to visitors. In this case, along with the main news, sports and weather pages, it’s also suggesting a bridge collapse story from last August. (However, these Sitelinks can be blocked using a Google Webmaster Tools account.)
But it’s also an issue when Google offers to search its results directly to find a specific page within your site (see the search box in the image). The search engine bases its results from pages that only currently crawled and indexed by Google, meaning that brand new pages which may be more relevant might not be included, and older pages that have more links to them might show up first, which leads to some awkward results. A search for “high school sports” brings up a story from September 22, 2006 as the number one result. The actual prep sports page is number four.
Now why does this matter to your local news web site? First, because so many visitors find your web site through search engines, it’s important to know how they’re getting to a specific page and why. If Google is prominently linking to an older internal page (displaying an older story page for a new/current search phrase), you can update that page with prominent links to current coverage, including a link at the top of the older news story with a push to a related archive of news stories about the subject. There are also sites who offer up customized pages to people who visit from a site such as The Drudge Report or Fark.
Secondly, you can make it easier to help Google find the page that is most helpful to your visitors. Some of that requires search engine optimization (SEO) and some of it is keyword driven. We’ve spent a lot of time implementing keywords and other SEO techniques into our news content for just that reason. If the search engines can’t find what it’s looking for, then neither can many of your visitors.
But some of the work also needs to take place when the story and headline are being written. Just as it’s important to write the best tease for a broadcast TV story, it’s important to have the clearest headline and most informative sub-headline.
But at the end of the day, you can only do so much. Search engines such as Google or Yahoo have their own ways of determining what is important, and that might not mesh with what seems important on a local level. But you can make it as easy as possible, and the reward will be more traffic and visitors who find the information they’re looking for the first time.
March 28th, 2008 at 8:45 am
in an industry obsessed with the almighty “pageview”, you’d think someone would conclude that by shortening the page (taking out the scroll feature) pageviews would automatically rise.
btw- then you could drop the 90’s sounding term ‘page’ for what will soon become known as a ’screenview’.
March 28th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
tdc–
Pageviews are already becoming much less important as a metric, in part because some sites are doing just what you suggest (Forbes.com is one that easily comes to mind).
There’s a lot more attention being paid to monthly unique visitors, and even more importantly, the amount of time they spend on the site per visit.
April 2nd, 2008 at 1:39 pm
@tdc / @Rick: you both are correct that creating shorter pages will generate more pageviews. Many sites have done this (including AOL, where I worked). And, tdc, your point about “pageview” really meaning “screenview” is a valid point, if only semantically. It is odd to have a print metaphor be so fundamental to the economics of online media.
All of that said, the real issues driving the PVs vs. Time on Site debate are:
1. Increased utilization of widgets, APIs, mashups, etc. The fact that “pages” are more and more becoming a conglomeration of multiple web apps, and that the apps themselves can be interacted with without generating a full new page drives the consideration of Time on Site. PVs were (and are) used because they are the best way for a content producer to benchmark the value of their content. If it generates X PVs, the content producer can back into the ballpark amount of revenue the content could generate. However, if content now is generating multiple interactions (and multiple ad calls), but is not generating multiple PVs, a new metric must be invented.
2. Increased consumption of video. Similar to the issue discussed above, ad inventory for video is less tied to PVs and more tied to how much time a visitor spends watching video. With pre-roll, post-roll and mid-roll formats, the number of ads can expand dramatically if you can increase the amount of time a visitor spends watching video, even though there is no increase in PVs.
To bring this back to the subject of the post, if your site has interactive features or features significant amount of video, preparing your content with the proper SEO techniques becomes even more vital. If you can deliver a visitor directly to the point in a video that deals with the query on which they were searching, you’ve delivered significant value to the visitor. This is somewhat advanced stuff, and few sites are doing this, but as you start to think about every bit of content as an entry point for visitors, this is the kind of thing that will need to be taken more seriously.
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:24 pm
good stuff.
thanks for the detailed response (both you guys).