Sloppy SEO on NBC.com – Learning From Others Mistakes

I’d like to start this post with two very important notes:

1. To the people responsible for SEO on NBC.com, my apologies. Please don’t read my critique as an indictment of your efforts – I can appreciate the difficulty of your task and I realize that some things are likely beyond your control.
2. This is a fantastic illustration of one basic fact – when it comes to SEO, the “little guy” always has a chance. For all their advantages, big companies often fail to accomplish the basics.

Here’s the story. My wife and I were watching Law & Order SVU and I wanted to figure out the name of one of the cast members. I searched for “law and order svu cast” and this page on NBC.com came up 5th. I found a link for “The Cast” under “About” on the drop-down menu, and landed on a page that lists the complete cast. Here’s a screenshot of that page:

Screenshot of the Law & Order SVU cast page on NBC.com

Based on the content, it would seem that the most popular cast member is Mariska Hargitay – and it seems that NBC.com is trying to optimize for her name. As I was casually reviewing the page, I started to notice some basic SEO problems. Since this page is on major website (NBC.com), I decided it might be interesting to catalog some of the basic SEO problems.

1. The HTML <title> tag is backwards. The tag reads “Law & Order Special Victims Unit – Bios of Mariska Hartigay,” but this doesn’t make much sense. People don’t search for “Law and Order – bio of Mariska Hartigay,” – they search “Mariska Hargitay bio.” While some might consider this splitting hairs, it’s important to note that every page about Law & Order SVU on NBC’s site starts with “Law & Order Special Victims Unit”. Title tags work best when the most important keyword is listed first in the title tag – not stuck behind the brand name.

2. Mariska’s name is mis-spelled in the HTML <title> tag. This is a simple yet devastating error. I didn’t notice it at first, but the last name is spelled “Hartigay” in the title tag and “Hargitay” in the bio text.

3. The meta description tag is empty. This is a basic no-no – looking at the source code of the page, no one has bothered to complete the meta description tag! Google uses this tag to describe the link – if you don’t complete the tag, Google automatically creates a description for you…and that description isn’t always correct.

4. The meta keywords tag is also empty. The meta keywords tag is insignificant to Google, but smaller search engines still use this tag for information, so it should be included. All in all, this is a very small mistake. However, it’s worth noting because it shows the person who generated the page didn’t know about and/or forgot about META tags. That’s indicative of a bad process.

5. The page has two sets of extensive menus. This isn’t terrible, but it’s definitely not a best practice in terms of SEO. At the top of the page, there’s a menu bar that starts with the item”shows.” Clicking on that link opens a drop-down menu with 63 (!) different menu options…and that’s not counting all the options under “watch video,” “news & sports,” etc. Here’s why that’s bad:

• Search engine bots look for trends. What are the most common words on a page? Do the links on the page center around a particular theme or topic? Are the images on the page related to a particular topic? If a user scanned this page and only looked at headlines, what would they find? etc.

• Search engine bots also read from the top down. So, just like newspaper articles, web pages should list the most important info first.

Because of the huge menu at the top of the page, the “trend” on this page is hard to determine. The main topic of the page isn’t found until we start reading the 2nd set of links. While this isn’t a huge problem – search engine bots likely know how to interpret this situation – it’s not a good way to lay out a web page.

The trend in images is confusing as well – I counted more than 50 images on this page, each with it’s own “alt” tag. Out of all of these images and alt tags, only 1 image is described with the keyword “Mariska Hargitay.” Only 1 in 50 images is related to the keyword “Mariska Hargitay” – is that a trend? Probably not.

The results: A lack of attention to detail and a poor navigation structure mean that this page doesn’t rank top 10 for the search term “Mariska Hargitay bio,” despite the fact this page is on a powerful domain (NBC.com). In fact, this page doesn’t even rank in the top 50 for that search term.

The solution:

• Fix the name mis-spelling and re-order the title tag.
• Write a meta description tag that’s descriptive and enticing.
• Complete the meta keywords tag, and then consider using it as the basis for some sort of dynamic keyword insertion script that would drop the keywords into some of the image alt tags.
• Find a better way to organize the content. I’m no organization expert, but I’m sure that NBC can afford to hire one to help them figure it out.

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Law & Order Special Victims Unit - Bios of Mariska Hartigay