Not News: There’s no such thing as privacy on the web. (Google and Bing are ‘officially’ searching Twitter and Facebook, now.)

Google and Bing have been searching Facebook and Twitter for a long time, in case you hadn’t discovered this by doing routine vanity searches for yourself on Google, Bing, and 123People, etc..

But the search engines this week are announcing new deals and technology that make these searches easier. For more details on that, follow FHK’s Web 2.0 Reader.

Bottom Line

• If you’re using the social networks primarily to keep in touch with friends and family, and want to continue believing that you have some privacy on the web, stay off of Twitter, and use the “just friends” settings on Facebook. According to Facebook, it’s default settings are not supposed to be searchable…yet…I would recommend choosing your own settings.
• However, if you’re using the social networks primarily for online profile management, and WANT your posts, etc., to be viewed in the search engines, you’re in luck. This is happening automatically on Twitter, and on Facebook, you just need to adjust your settings to “everyone” under the privacy features.

 

Why You Need to Include your Keywords in Your Blog Post Titles

Keywords, according to DefineThat:

Keyword is the term used for words included in a web page that would match words used by web surfers in finding that web page (via a search engine). Keywords can simply be words included in the body text of the document, or added to the header using meta tags to increase the number of keywords. Selecting keywords, that match your target audiences’ use of the web is a critical marketing tactic.

Blogging is a natural transition from print media to the world wide web for many traditional writers of all stripes. While there are some writing skills that transition well, some do not. One of those is choosing titles for your posts is one technique that has changed dramatically.

Back in the old days (circa 2005), writers of all strips (creative writers, journalists, op-ed writers, etc.) would title their pieces very much the way music artists and movie producers choose their titles. The title would be something “catchy,” but the reader would have to read the piece before knowing how it related to the story.

You see, there is a difference between print media and online media. In print media, the reader has already made somewhat of a committment to read an article, story, book, or chapter by purchasing the book, magazine or newspaper, and opening it. Online media, and especially blogging, doesn’t work that way. A handful of your readers will be regulars to your blog, but most will find you through their networks and through the search engines. A few of your readers are going to find your post via referrals from their friends on social networks. Some may have even visited your blog before and liked it enough to add your feed to their feed reader. But most of your blog readers are going to be people who don’t know or care who you are – they just found your post on a search engine like Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or Ask.

Except for your fans (your regular blog readers), the majority of your potential audience will decide whether or not to even click on your post solely by the title that is displayed on the social network, feed, or search engine results page (SERP). Most of hundreds, or even thousands of blog titles to skim on a weekly basis, and they only have time to click on a few of those posts. Your title needs to tell them exactly what your post is about, so if that’s the information they’re looking for, they’ll click on it, (hopefully) read it, and (even more hopefully) forward it to others in their network.

Also, the search engines seem to be increasingly giving more page-rank weight to titles of posts, as opposed to tags, categories and text. SEOWizz.net has a posted some early research on this, entitled Bing SEO – How Does it Differ To Google? (Do you see what I did there? I took a blog post that had a great “title tag” because it had the keywords in the title, and then I helped SEOWizz.net with its page rank by making hyperlinking to that post using the same keywords.)

Here at Ft. Hard Knox, we’ve been noticing this trend for a while – posts which contain the terms most likely to be searched on the search engine in the title consistently get higher traffic than posts with “clever” titles that do not reveal the subject matter of the post.

So, give it a try: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to start including your keywords in your post titles, and let us know if you see any changes in your traffic sources. Good luck!

Where do you Google? (Bing, Yahoo, Ask….)

There’s an old joke in the south that goes something like this:

A guy walks up to the counter and asks for a Coke. The kid behind the counter says, “Sure, Mister. What kind of Coke would you like? We have Dr. Pepper, Sprite, Pepsi…”

Just like “Coke” has become a household name synonymous with “soda,” or “cola,” so has the name “Google” become a synonym for “online search,” as is satirically illustrated in this College Humor Video, Googling with Bing: The easiest way to Google since Yahoo!

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

So, why am I bringing this up now? Well, Bing.com is the new search engine that wants to eclipse Google. It’s run by Microsoft. So far, we’re getting almost 10% of our our search engine traffic from Bing.com right now (compared to just a little over 10% from Yahoo, and nearly 80% from Google). That’s pretty good for a search engine that is so new. Naturally, there are a lot of questions – Ian Paul, of PC World addresses a few in his post from May, 5 Things I Want to Know about Bing (So far the answers to the questions are “yes” to the first four, and “?” to the 5th).

For now, if you want to compare Bing with Google, try Bingle, a nifty little site that shows a side-by-side comparison of the search results on both sites. Example below. (Note, the web address is not what you’d expect: http://bingle.pwnij.com).

Click to Enlarge Photo