Crowned Host

Last week, Alistair Darling’s economic budget was making headlines and stirring up a big media fuss, you might expect a quick Google search of terms like ‘budget live’ or ‘Budget 2010′ would bring up the official Prime Minister’s website www.number10.gov.uk but it doesn’t appear at the top, in fact it doesn’t even appear in the top 50 for either of these phrases, outranked by news articles and meaningless blogs. For something so important with such big interest this should be a priority, to avoid critics appearing higher up in the rankings and generating political influence against the government.

To recognize what the problem might be, you can take a deeper look at the website from a Search Engine Optimisation perspective; it’s useful to learn from the mistakes of others and try and avoid ever making them yourself.

At closer inspection, the Downing St website appears to have extremely poor SEO, they make amateur mistakes like having no ‘title tag’ or containing poorly optimised articles with no keywords or descriptive text. The website is packed uses techniques like stuffing it with keywords such as ‘tattoos’, ‘piercings’ and ‘polish armed forces’ that are really frowned upon by the search engines and the SEO community. A closer look of the general SEO of Number 10 shows the brand getting lost in translation, the official YouTube channel is located at www.youtube.com/downingst rather than /number10 and both refer to their media content as ‘number10tv’ even though a Google search for that term definitely doesn’t find what your looking for.

On a further note, Gordon Brown’s tweets come from @downingstreet rather than @number10 or @primeminister. All of these mistakes are fundamental basics when creating a digital presence for a brand and you might have thought the British Government could have done a little better than this.

In common SEO practice, most agencies will buy up URLs relevant to their site and redirect to their website or prevent their competition from buying them; unusually both www.number10tv.com and www.number10tv.co.uk are both still for sale. Depending on whether Gordon Brown has an in house SEO or an agency, he needs to get rid of them.

If you are looking for achester SEO, then ask Prodo to improve your Cheshire SEO.