I’m using the winter break to catch up on many of the notes that I took during the last semester and thought I could post a few of the more interesting ones.

Earlier this fall I was a speaker at the Online News Association meeting in San Francisco.

Here are my twitter like notes from one of the discussions about content and search.

We were told to divorce our headlines from the HTML tag…so that you can customize the HTML tag to reflect the keywords that we should have researched. For example, one speaker included the word “police blotter” in a crime story because she said that in her community that was one of the words that people sometimes search for.

Meta Keywords Tag has no influence.

Duplicate Content is a common problem. The search engines will see multiple versions and the pages will compete against each other. This lead to a discussion about canonical tag. It is apparently very easy to mess up implementing this and have pages completely be overlooked.

Not all links pass authority. Google has clearly said that paid links will not work. Twitter links are all tagged with a nofollow, they will not help ones rank. Facebook links should help ones rank.

What keywords are people actually searching for? Roughly 80 percent are people seeking information. The consumers have questions and news site provide many of those answers.

Google Trends was recommended again for the hot trends. One of the experts has an RSS feed of these displayed on her home page so she can keep a close eye on things hour by hour. They recommended using the trend function to see when people begin to search for certain words so that you can be ready for those searches.

Google Insights for Search is a similar tool. You can type in a word and see similar information but you can run more filters. One ability is to search for rising searches. Google AdWords is free and accessible to everyone. You can put in your keywords and shows you the volume of that word and similar and related words. One of the experts says that her team uses it a lot to help with content. Yahoo buzz is similar to Google Trends.

Facebook Lexicon gives you a measure of how often words are being used…what is enterting the social conversation. Twitter stream graphs is related to the Lexicon in that it lets you see how people’s usage of terminology is responding to the news events we cover.

Slacker Keyword Research: The simple way to find keywords is just type in words into google and see what google suggests. The experts have found that the words that are suggested are closely related to the keyword research that they have done. A Cheat Sheet Use full first and last names. If you can only give one name use the most important last name. Use the numeric form for numbers. Use meaningful descriptors. If you are posting a movie review, say “movie review SuperMan” Avoid abbreviations and alternate spellings

Include proper names/locations.

Include the word “watch” if video is on the page.