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!

What the A.P. is Missing

I was just reading an article at Tech Crunch asking the question, Does Google  Really Control the News?  While the story was not directly related to my thesis, it pointed out something that I had missed in the whole A.P. content controversy.  We’ve argued that the A.P. benefits when bloggers quote and link to them because we send them more traffic.  That’s certainly true as far as it goes but it’s not the end of the story.

Search engine rankings are based in large part on how many inbound links exist to your site, article, story, etc.  Every link boosts your ranking even if only minimally.  Links from larger sites with more traffic are more beneficial but all links help you.  So every time a blogger links to an A.P. story, not only does that directly drive some traffic from the link, it also helps improve the search engine ranking for that story at the A.P.

If all of us stopped linking to any A.P. stories, the result would be significantly lower search engine ranking for the A.P., resulting in much lower total traffic for them.  My particular site might be small but my impact is larger than just the traffic sent directly from my site because I also impact search engine rankings.

We hold more power than any of us generally believes but only if we act in concert.  Individually we can do very little.  I’d be willing to bet, however, that the loss of all blog links would do significant damage to traffic to the A.P. and they’d be forced to rethink their position.

Also see:

• Once Again: The A.P. Says It’s Going To Sue Aggregators
• Boycott the A.P.!
• The Washington Times Copies the AP – Starts Charging Bloggers to Quote Them

 

SEO Spot-Check: What Links Rank Highest on my Online Profile?

As promised last week, we’ve completed our study of news, indexes, and social networking sites rank highest on an individual’s Google profile.

A person’s “Google Profile” is the list of links on the “SERPs” (search engine results pages) resulting from “query,” or “search,” on Google for a person’s name. In online profile building, it is preferable that the first couple of pages worth of links (the first 20 links) provide accurate, positive information about that person. To build our profiles, therefore, it is helpful to know which links are likely to show up on those first couple of pages of a Google search.

To evaluate this, we chose thirty-six names of individuals, from various industries and various levels of name recognition, and tallied the types of websites that showed up on the first two pages of Google under their names. All of the people chosen are known by the public in some way – either as artists, entertainers, writers, educators, bloggers, politicians, etc.. To prevent the possibility of anyone trying to manipulate their profiles as a result of their names showing on this published study, we have chosen not to print the names we used. If a name received multiple links from the same category, that category was counted only once.

Following is the list of the top 12 link categories, and the number of times websites in the category appeared on the first two pages of each of the thirty-six Google profiles, expressed as a percentage of XX/36. For example, if the links from the category appeared on 34 of 36, or 34/36 individuals’ SERPs, the category on the table below would show a 94% SERPs rating. Note that all of the profiles had links in numerous categories, so the percentages added up vertically will not equal 100%.

Link Category	Amount of time this category was utilized on the 36 sample profiles
Niche/Industry Media*	94%
Own Website, Blog, Domain	94%
Mentions on Others’ Blogs, Forums, and Websites	86%
YouTube, GoogleVideo, VodPod, other video	72%
Wikipedia, Niche Wikis, Info Directories: Answers, Infoplease, About, Woopidoo, BrainyQuotes	72%
Amazon, IMBD Google Books&Movies, Reviews, MetaCafe	56%
Social Networks: Facebook, Linked-IN, MySpace, Twitter, Newsvine, Digg	53%
MSM: Alphabet Media, Newspapers, TV, Radio websites	50%
iRadio, Podcasting Sites: BTR, Music, AOL, Last.fm, MTV, Rhapsody, Vh1, mp	39%
Registries, Indexes, and Feeds: FriendFeed, feedage, NNDB, 123People, Zoominfo, BusinessCard2, Naymz, Plaxo, Technorati, Blog Catalog, Daylife, Classmates, Adoption Reg, Geneology, Meetup	28%
Photos: Google Images, Wikimedia, flikr	25%
Blogger, Wordpress, Wix, Yahoo, Geocities, MSN, Google	25%

 

*Niche/Industry publications specialize in the profilee’s own line of work etc..
Examples of niche/industry sites are CMT.com, in country music, and
Townhall.com in political news and commentary.

Clearly, in this spot-check, the links most valuable to the thirty-six Google profiles studied were links from niche and industry blogs, and the profilee’s own domain, website and blog(s). Also valueable were links from other blogs, forums and websites, from video sites, and from wikis and other information directories.

Wednesday Web 2.0 Q&A

The idea for this new feature, and the questions for this week are from Ben Hodge, of Kansas Progress. If you have questions you would like answered in upcoming posts, or if you have additional story ideas, please e-mail Jenn.

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Q. Can you explain twitter to me? My understanding is that if I really thought way too highly of myself and thought that people would care about what I was doing every 10 minutes of the day, that I would “twitter” them. But why are other groups on twitter, when RSS does almost the same thing?

A. Twitter is a developing phenomenon. Yes, there are some people that literally use it to keep in touch with their “friends” throughout the day, but there are a bunch of conservatives there now that are using it for legitimate networking purposes. Check out TCOT, (the feed is here)and TCON (feed).

 Even if you don’t really do much with your account there, however, any posts you do rank very high in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). You can use Twitterfeed to have your Twitter account automatically updated with your blog posts, too, which is a very convenient feature. You do NOT have to tell anyone what you’re having for lunch or where.

In fact, for general networking, it’s probably better not to do a lot of “small talk” (a little is fine – lets people know they’re dealing with a real person). Also see: Twitter, Twitter Everywhere

Q. Which [social networking] sites should I join…How often must they be updated?

A. It’s really a good idea just to at least “reserve” your name on the major social networking/bookmarking sites. It usually takes just a few minutes, and you really don’t have to keep MOST* of them updated. It’s amazing what a political adversary can/will do to ruin your online reputation. The added advantage of these is that many of them give you a chance to enter your own blog URL, and that will help you with linkage.

Facebook, Linked-IN, and Twitter are the “Biggies” right now. YouTube is great, even if you just set up an account there for the purposes of watching (not uploading). Naymz and Plaxo rank high on the search engines, too.

 Beyond that, it’s just really up to you. There are hundreds of these sites, and you have to draw the line somewhere. The next tier down would be del.icio.us, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Digg, and Propeller.  Stay tuned for an upcoming study to be released soon on which news, indexes, and social networking sites rank highest on Google.

*How often to update? Well, keep in mind that with the social networking sites, you tend to get out of them what you put in, so it’s good to be active in at least a couple. We have received (unconfirmed) information that Twitter may soon start deleting accounts that are over 180 days old. Also, some search engines give less weight or refuse to count links that are over six months old, so it’s a good idea to check on your accounts, even the ones you’re not “active” on at least twice a year.

 Q. [In terms of Search Engine Optimization], if [the links I put on Social Networking sites] don’t “look like” links, but merely show the URL, does that matter?

A. Some social networking sites, such as Facebook and Digg.com, don’t allow “hyperlinks,” (text that points to another URL) or any text that contains html. You won’t need to worry about this for SEO, because the search engines are reading the source code, and will recognize the link, anyway.

This is a valid question to address, however, because on your own blog posts, you can maximize the benefit of internal and external links by properly using “anchor text.” In a nutshell, this means that it is better to format a link to your blog like this: Ft. Hard Knox, rather than like this. For more information on anchor text, see Don’t be Link-Lovin’ in Vain (Judiciously using ‘Anchor Text’).

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Do you Need a Sitemap?

Last Monday, I was reading an SEOmoz article, and decided to ask FHK’s IT Guy, Ron, if we should have one of those. Mind you, I had no idea what I was talking about, but after reading information like this, this and this, it sounded like something we should try. Basically, a sitemap is an index for your blog that is easily read by search engines.

Ron explained that we had one at one time, but we’d not yet reinstalled it after our most recent upgrad. In the past week, after installing this sitemap, our traffic from search engines has increased an average of 42% daily. I’d say it was a change that has been well worth it. If you’re a self-hosted blogger, you might want to give it a try.

Ron has installed this plug-in for us – Google XML (Sitemaps Generator for Wordpress). (Also, here is another Wordpress Plugin that creates a sitemap. If you’re using Blogger, Google will automatically create a sitemap for you, but you may want to submit the sitemap to the other search engines; Also, here’s some helpful info for Blogger.com users.)