Amateurs at the New York Times

Dear New York Times,

As a web marketer, I work with many businesses at all levels of technical know-how.

But for a company as massive as The New York Times to be making some of the most basic of Internet Search Engine Optimization mistakes makes me worried.

When I saw this today, I’ll admit I chuckled for a second, but it honestly got me worried to see how can a company your size can be overlooking the most basic aspects of online marketing.

Fix These Mistakes and Exponentially Grow Web Visitors

Although your article ranks on the search engines for a few keywords related to the article topic, there are still some serious changes needed on the site.

Considering you know print is dying and that your newspaper needs to be online and focused on getting website traffic (thus ad revenue), I would hope the great minds at NYTimes.com already have this on the radar.

But just in case, I thought I’d put in my 2 cents…

Fix Your Amateur Addresses For Articles

Think of your actual website address (technically called the webpage file name) as a street sign that tells search engines “this specific article is about X, Y, and Z“.

The article file names on your site are hurting your web traffic. For example, the article about Pandora.com possibly going public after a very challenging startup journey has the file name of “08pandora.html” (circled in picture below).

This tells search engines “my article is about ‘o8pandora’”…

Needless to say, your current webpage address makes no sense.

Make This Change

You should have named it “pandora-going-public.html“, “pandora-ipo.html“, etc.

While I know there is more to the article topic then just the IPO, this serves as a simple example.

Wouldn’t it make more sense if you told search engines “this article is about Pandora’s IPO” or “this article is about Pandora going public” instead of “my article is about ‘08pandora’”…

This is a simple change to make, but something that could have huge results for your web traffic.

Secondly, Your Meta Keywords Are Horrible

I’ll spare my readers the technical mumbo jumbo of what meta keywords are, but you can simply think of them as yet another way to tell search engines “this article is about keywords such as keyword 1, keyword 2, and keyword 3. If someone searches online for those words, then you should show my article”.

Again, the article at NYTimes.com is about Pandora, a web based company, possibly going public this year. Therefore, you would expect that the meta keywords would be something along the lines of “pandora going public, pandora ipo, etc. etc.”.

Here’s what your staff at NYTimes.com decided to put.

Computers and the Internet
Radio
Music
Start-ups
Westergren Tim
Pandora.com

Honestly, This is Pathetic

You need to get specific when you’re telling search engines what your article is about.

Yes, your article is somehow related to “computers and internet“, but that doesn’t mean that you should put that in your meta keywords. Put keywords directly related to your article topic such as “Pandora going public“, etc.

Action Plan For NY Times Web Department

If NYTimes.com wants to remain relevant and respected as a modern website that is the source of important information online, you can’t be making amateur mistakes that are costing you website visitors…seriously, if you change just some basic things on your site, I’m confident your web search traffic will increase exponentially!

These Simple Changes Will Exponentially Grow Your Web Search Traffic

• change your page file names to include keywords / the actual topics your article is about.
  • in making these changes, do not forget to “301 redirect” your old amateur webpage file names  so that if someone visits 08pandora.html they’re taken to the new pandora-going-public.html webpage.
• optimize your meta keywords to include keywords specifically related to the article. It’s a good idea to stay relatively focused when doing this, so I wouldn’t recommend putting “computers” or “internet” as your keywords even if the article is about a internet based company that just so happens to run on a computer somewhere going public in the next year…Nearly every article in the “technology” section is about “computers and internet”…don’t put these as keywords for articles.

I have a million other suggestions for the site in terms of easy ways to increase your website visitors, but these first two make for a simple but effective list of changes you need to make.

Looking forward to your response,

Jon Tucker

To Readers: Seeing Big Companies Make Newbie Mistakes?

This is not the first time I’ve seen a big company make an amateur mistake. I think it’d be interesting to discuss ideas of where you see that some of these untouchable companies could improve.

Looking forward to your thoughts…