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3 SEO Insights Listening To NPR This Morning

December 31, 2008 By Webposition SEO Team

By Scott Goodyear

I was listening to NPR this morning. They were talking about some experimental photography project that was on the web. I didn’t quite catch the name of the group, so I did a Google search on a few of the keywords that I thought they were mentioning.

Amazingly, even as I was listening to the show, Google had already indexed the NPR page that described the subject of the show. Looking a bit closer, NPR is fairly smart. Before their morning show even aired, several hours earlier, they had posted a text summary of the show.

But… while I listened to their show and read the NPR post, I tried clicking on the link to the http://www.sametime715.com/ site. The site was down. I got a Yahoo 999 error.

Trying again about 20 minutes later, I was able to get to the site, but it did not include any pictures, only the text from the site.

Obviously the site was still having some problems. A few hours later, now, I can get to the site and actually view it normally.

Interesting site/idea but not quite my cup of tea. It looks mainly like something that you would see as a photogallery on FLICKR or someone’s blog. Yet this has to be of interest to someone out there and were it running normally, it would probably gain a considerable amount of links almost immediately just from the NPR broadcast.

3 things that I learned from this NPR experience:

• Plan Ahead! Know how the engines tend to index your site.NPR may or may not keep track of how often Google visits. But if you were to check Google’s WebMaster Tools and your website’s analytics software, like WebTrends, you can compare and contrast the two in order to get a good picture of how often your site is indexed. You may even learn that there are certain pages or areas of your site that are better indexed, or getting more frequent indexing than other portions of your site. You can then plan and publish quite strategically.
• If possible, understand your hosting company and technology.If you know that your site is going to be highlighted on a major TV or radio show, or other publication, you certainly want to make sure that your site can handle a spike in traffic if it occurs. The superbowl flush may be a myth, but the Digg/Slashdot/whatever effect is real.

  You can read about how real it can be: via Inc magazine’s story on gift card reseller Plastic Jungle, a relatively unknown but awesome graphic designer’s post about getting “dug” a few times, or the story of the ever growing and popular social bloglet service Twitter and their experience with technology hampering their ability to provide scalable services.

• Are there other limitations to your account? What stories do error messages tell about your site/company?I would be willing to bet that the 715 site has no control over the error pages that their host, Yahoo, serves up for their site or at least doesn’t know that it is configurable.

  If you can, you may want to create a custom error pages to encourage users to perhaps book mark your site and return later. Give them a hint as to what they are missing. If I didn’t think that this would make a good post, I would have listened to the NPR broadcast, tried the site, got the generic error page, and never came back or tried the 715 site again. In one ear and out the other, eh? Worse yet, what if NPR had linked to the 715 site incorrectly?

  If you were on a social bookmarking site, a blog, a forum, etc. and some page from a site was mentioned, from a site you’ve never heard of, you tried the link but got to a generic error page, would you be more or less likely to return and re-try a site the link? Attention spans are short. Would you give a site a second chance if you saw one of these 404 error pages? Or something a bit better? I would bet that the odds would be better.

  I know that some are thinking, “but that is stupid, it’s just an error page”…

  When was the last time that people were blogging about your error message? Freely creating viral videos about it? Creating error page art, T-Shirts, fan clubs, and more about your site, let alone your error page? Sure this is an extreme, but it shows the underlying fact that a error page can be more than a dead end.

Now, not everyone will care about their site getting extra traffic, visitors, links, and so on. But many of us do. Not everything can be covered or planned for. But you never know planning and understanding a few things like this might help. Good luck in your online marketing efforts!