From today, the headlines of the BBC News website will become longer to make its stories easier to find on search engines.

“We estimate that about 29% of BBC News website UK traffic comes from search engines.”, says Steve Herrmann, editor of BBC News website.

The BBC will therefore allow its journalists to create two headlines for a story. While the shorter one between 31 and 33 characters appears on the front page and the website indexes as well as on mobile phones, the longer one – up to 55 characters will appear on the story itself – and in search engine results.

For the SEO skeptics out there, even a big media company like the BBC is jumping on the SEO bandwagon, shouldn’t you have a proper SEO strategy for your website?

It’s also interesting that choosing to optimize the headlines and titles is a core part of what is reported in this article. So often, professional SEOs go crazy over building backlinks, forgetting that optimizing the title and headlines (on-page SEO) is also important.