So, I run Media UK, the UK’s online media directory. Media UK’s an interesting project for me: it allows me to test things on a large site, and bring those learnings to those that pay my salary.

Only 11% of Media UK’s traffic is “direct” - that is to say, only 11% of people who visit Media UK do it by typing “www.mediauk.com” into their browsers. A whopping 77% of Media UK’s traffic comes from search engines - predominantly, like most websites, from Google, which is responsible for 79% of all the search engine traffic.

Among the plethora of Google Analytics reports, you can view ‘top landing pages’: those pages people first saw when coming to the Media UK. Given that most traffic comes from search engines, this roughly equates to the websites where Media UK outperforms a media owner’s own website - by coming high, if not #1, for the media owner’s keywords on Google. This, therefore, provides a list of the not altogether fairly titled “worst UK media sites for Search Engine Optimisation” - where people have visited Media UK instead of the website they were looking for.

The full list is below, but let’s examine a few.

Tiny Pop is the top of the list. Tiny Pop is a TV channel on Sky, if you’ve not heard of it. Media UK is currently #1 in a search for Tiny Pop. Indeed, that Google search doesn’t actually bring back the ‘real’ Tiny Pop site at all. It does bring back a few directory pages like mine, as well, amusingly, a link to a Yahoo question where someone is wondering how to find the Tiny Pop website. When you do find it (clue) the website is a fully-featured Flash site. The makers have produced alternative text links to help Google spider the site, but they’ve also carefully made them display:none on the front page. As a result, Google have banned them entirely, and tinypop.com appears nowhere on Google. (The bizarre thing is that the links also appear within the Flash movie, so if it’s an aesthetic reason why they’ve hidden the HTML links, why replicate them within the Flash?)

The list is also full of media names which haven’t been carried over to their online presence. As an example, the Reading Evening Post has a website which they’ve branded ‘getreading’. Nowhere on the page does it appear to mention ‘Reading Evening Post’, and while the page description does on Google (and getreading.co.uk appears higher than Media UK’s page), it’s not altogether obvious that if you wanted the Reading Evening Post’s site, you’d click the link.

London Lite appears to manage both of the above crimes - a different brand and making life hard for search engines. Brilliantly, their website has in the title bar “L o n d o n L i t e”, thus making it virtually invisible for search engines (albeit it still appears at #3). The main website for London Lite is actually branded thisislondon.co.uk (just like sister publication the Evening Standard). Once more, even though Media UK’s result is #4 in Google, it still gets a good amount of visits.

And some media brands in this list suffer from their very name. How do you spell “2ten” anyway? Is “Mercia” really the name of a radio station? A search for mercia fm radio station gets Media UK at #1. Mercia’s website (split between merciafm.co.uk and mercia.co.uk, bad GCap) contains the markup <title>Mercia</title><meta name="description" content="Mercia" /> which doesn’t help too much in a quest for excellent Google optimisation. (I have no doubt Robin’s team will fix this pretty fast, incidentally - they’re quite good).

Finally, talkSPORT is in this list, and I didn’t understand why. You can use Google Analytics to drill down to “what people searched for to find this particular page” level; and it would appear that a search for talk sport uk brings Media UK quite high in the list. talkSPORT would do well to add “UK” in their title/description somewhere.

This has been an interesting exercise; and I’m gratified that none of the websites I have some responsibility for (either now or in the past) appear on the list. If you’re a media company website owner reading this page, please don’t change your websites; I like the traffic.

The worst UK media sites for SEO - from mediauk.com
1. Tiny Pop
2. The Scottish Sun
3. Century Radio 105.4
4. Reading Evening Post
5. Blackmore Vale Magazine
6. South Wales Echo
7. London Lite
8. Official UK Playstation Magazine
9. talkSPORT
10. Sunday Express
11. Derby Evening Telegraph
12. Kiss 100
13. 2ten FM
14. Classic FM
15. Mercia

Photo: Jan Krömer. Used under licence. My full disclosure details my relationship with Google and Media UK.

So, I went to Cork for a journalism conference last Thursday.

You might reasonably wonder what I know about journalism. Not much, in truth: my background is in music radio.

But my first week in commercial radio was spent in the newsroom.

As is now a source of fascination for some people, incredibly my first job on my first day was holding the mobile phone for one of our reporters, Maria Duarte. You might wonder whether it was very lazy of her not to carry her own mobile phone: but this was back in 1989, when mobile phones were the size of a small flight bag and incredibly heavy - it was like carrying a car battery around. I had to carry it for her as she went to report on a house fire in Bradford - light damage, but smelly. Nobody died, but the station still sent out a reporter to file a piece from the incident, and then to interview a fireman on a Uher tape machine. This piece of audio was driven back to the station, edited on tape using something quite like sticky-tape and some chinagraph pens, transferred to an eight-track cartridge, and played out on the next hour’s news bulletin.

I suppose you’d marvel at the staffing levels of the newsroom if you compared it to a typical newsroom now. During the day, there was a news editor, at least four other journalists, a sports editor, a sports reporter, and a slightly nervous thin looking kid who occasionally helped to carry mobile phones. That’s a news team of around eight in total; in fact, I think it might have been even larger.

That team was creating news for, essentially, one radio station: Classic Gold. News bulletins were five minutes an hour; ten minutes at 1pm. Pennine FM took the first three minutes of every bulletin, with a clunky-sounding timecheck to allow them to opt-out. And that was it: no web, no text message alerts, no production for different stations. Occasionally, the team got a story accepted by IRN, and it was sent around the country. News cues were written on typewriters, on little pieces of A5 thin paper. Audio was on cartridge. If you were really unfortunate, you dropped them on the way in to the studio.

And you try and tell people that these days.

One of the things I wished I’d said at the conference was to tell the students to make sure that they can do more than just write. If they can’t take photos, edit videos, record decent audio, and write, then they’ll be useless in the emerging journalistic world.

Hopefully, when I speak in a panel on Wednesday night in Dublin (on the same subject - what are the odds of that?!), I’ll remember to say it.

Photo: Steve Rhodes. Used under licence.

Cory Bergman of the excellent Lost Remote posts the “top (US) newspaper sites in minutes spent”:

1. NYTimes.com (550,035 total minutes in thousands)
2. USAToday.com (136,603)
3. WashingtonPost.com (145,083)
4. Boston.com (79,712)
5. WSJ.com (72,110)

For comparison, here are the top 5 UK newspapers, to see where we are. (The UK figures are from August 2007; the US figures from November 2007).

1. The Sun (53,100 total minutes, in thousands)
2. Daily Mail (48,900)
3. Telegraph (32,300)
4. The Times (30,600)
5. The Guardian (30,000)

…and here are how those papers, which are all national, do in average daily sales for June-November 2007:

1. The Sun (3,129)
2. Daily Mail (2,347)
3. Telegraph (887)
4. The Times (640)
5. The Guardian (361)

Spooky. Sales are in the same order as website popularity. Who’d have thought it?

Photo: Elvert Barnes. Used under licence.

When I started work in commercial radio in Bradford, eighteen years ago, the news team had around six or seven people there during the day, while programming had three full-time members of staff. The presenters each did three-hour shifts; and there were two radio engineers. That was the total staffing level excepting local and national sales; and hugely generous for most local radio stations now.

I note this piece in Lost Remote, which says that a newspaper, the LA Times, is cutting 150 jobs:

70 of the job cuts will come from the newsroom, which will lower the editorial contingent from 940 to 870.

870 people within editorial? I’m amazed. I wonder what they do all day?