Technorati, the blog search engine, has made some changes to the way that they have optimized portions for search find-ability (SEO) in web search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com. Steve Rubel's recent post pointed out the new title being used by Technorati to catch the attention of a searcher and potentially draw them into the wonderful world of the blogosphere. Here is an example of what the old and new titles would look like in a search result for Technology:
OLD TITLE: Technorati Tag: Technology
NEW TITLE: Technology - See what people are saying right now on Technorati.
Obviously, the new title is more catchy and intuitive since the mainstream searcher may not know what Technorati or a Tag is. In performing the search for Technology on Google, I found that the Google has yet to index the page with the new title format. However, it is only a matter of time and I think it is a super improvement.
Flickr, the online photo sharing repository site, has a similar SEO (search engine optimization) strategy that places the user generated title of a photo as the title tags for search engines to index. I noticed this last week so I am unsure as to how long Flickr has been optimizing its photos based on user generated titles but I would not be surprised if this has been the case since its creation. To better explain the SEO of Flickr I performed a search on "My New Coffee Mug" on Google since I know I have a photo in my Flickr account that has a similar title. In performing the search I found a Flickr photo from my account as the first item that appears in the search results since my search keywords are in the title of the photo on Flickr.
So if you want your Flickr photos appropriately indexed by search engines you should be sure to create a descriptive title that search engines can index. However, if you do not want your photos not to be found you should make them private or make sure to not title your photos - most likely the search engines will then ignore your photos.
