Mashable has a post on bad, good, better and best practice when writing headlines for SEO.

The advice is at this link.

Journalism.co.uk runs a one-day course on SEO, a practical guide to getting your work found. The next one takes place in June.

Tipster: Sarah Marshall

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link.

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – how to set up a recording studio
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – How to request a Google+ profile for your news site
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – inspiring audio slideshows made by students
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – 10 search tricks you might not know
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – making the most of LinkedIn groups

Analytics can give you much more information than just your number of readers. Delve deeper and analytics can also lead to news stories and help shape editorial angles as a story unfolds.

In this week’s podcast Sarah Marshall, Journalism.co.uk’s technology correspondent, speaks to:

• Laura Amico, who set up Washington DC-based Homicide Watch. Laura explains how she gets news stories by looking at the different terms people are searching for.
• Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat, a real-time analytics company used by major publishers including Al Jazeera and the New York Times. Tony gives examples of how news organisations respond to what audiences are reading.

You can hear future podcasts by signing up to the Journalism.co.uk iTunes podcast feed.

• Newsbeat, an analytics tool just for news sites, launches
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – setting up Newsbeat for analytics
• #jpod: How news organisations are using Pinterest
• #jpod – Open data and journalism: How and why journalists should be digging for stories
• Poynter: How to set up Newsbeat, real-time analytics tool for news sites

The Next Web has compiled a list of 30 specialist search engines.

Journalists may find TinEye and PicSearch particularly helpful when verifying photos from social media, Greplin handy to search their own accounts, and should take a look at some of the blog and social media search options.

The list is well worth reading and bookmarking. I would add Topsy to the list of search engines journalists should know about.

Tipster: Sarah Marshall

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link– we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – 11 social network search engines
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – use Topsy to search the social web
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – 10 search tricks you might not know
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – 50 Twitter chats for journalists
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – try Google Correlate

More than one in 10 Google UK search results includes at least one journalist photo and bio byline, according to a study by search and social analytics company Searchmetrics.

The study looked at the top 100 search results from 1 million keywords and found that 13 per cent included journalist bios and pictures for the author of articles.

Getting a photo and bio displayed in search results requires a journalist to have a Google+ account and their profile to be linked with news stories (instructions on how to do this are here).

UK writers in the top 20 include Charles Arthur, the Guardian’s technology editor, and Edward Chester, reviews editor at TrustedReviews.com.

US journalists dominate the top 20, “meaning UK journalists and publications are missing out on increased visibility, traffic and potential advertising revenue”, according to a release from Searchmetrics.

The author profile feature, known as authorship markup, is something that Google has been rolling out since the end of last year. It includes author profile information with a thumbnail image and links.

The release states:

Journalists and bloggers who write about technology, medical and food topics are among those that are most visible in author profile integrations according to the study by search and social analytics company, Searchmetrics, which analysed Google UK search results relating to one million popular keywords.

Marcus Tober, founder and chief technology officer of Searchmetrics said in a statement:

More writers from US-based sites are appearing in the top 20 because authors generally need to have a profile on the Google+ social network to be displayed in author integrations – and we assume more writers for US sites are on Google+ and also Google has possibly encouraged some US sites to set up their articles for author integrations.

It was surprising to see more than one in ten of the results tested are showing author integrations because this is still a new feature – it’s much higher than I expected.

Searchmetrics top 20 authors with picture and bio bylines

Author, Writes for (includes), Topic, Page 1 integrations*, Total integrations**

1. Elaine Lemm , NYT, About.com, Food, 581, 1,989
2. Dr. Melissa Stöppler, WebMDNetwork, Medical, 545, 1,412
3. Diana Rattray, About.com, Food, 530, 1,529
4. Tim Fisher, About.com, Technology, 472, 1,897
5. Alison Doyle, About.com, Job search, 438, 1,442
6. Dr. William Shiel, WebMDNetwork, Medical,  403, 866
7. Dr. Ben Wedro, MDDirect.org, Medical, 328, 877
8. Dr. John Cunha, WebMDNetwork, Medical, 328, 790
9. Bradley Mitchell, About.com, Technology, 321, 1,363
10. Cathy Wong, About.com, Alt Medicine,  316, 839
11. Stephanie Jaworski, JoyofBaking.com, Food, 307, 1,005
12. Laura Porter, Visit Britain, About.com, Travel, 281, 1,929
13. Edward Chester, TrustedReviews.com, Technology, 264, 733
14. Luke Westaway, CNET UK, Technology, 254, 1,292
15. Gordon Laing, Cameralabs.com, Photography, 248 , 1,200
16. Charles Arthur, Guardian, Technology, 218, 1,271
17. Laura K. Lawless, French, About.com, Languages, 218, 705
18. Hubertus Keil, Alicante-Spain.com, Travel, 214, 1,070
19. Adam Pash, Lifehacker, Lifestyle/Tech, 204, 1,311
20. Richard Trenholm, CNET UK, Technology, 200, 1,931

*The number of times a writer appears in author profile integrations displayed on the first page of Google.co.uk search results in Searchmetrics’s study
**The total number of times a writer appears in author profile integrations displayed in Google.co.uk search results in Searchmetrics’s study

• Journalists get a photo byline in Google News (but only those on Google+)
• Google announces new Chrome extension to block ‘content farms’
• Reporters to get author pages with Google’s new authorship markup
• Media release: StumbleUpon is most important content sharing site for Mail Online
• TechCrunch: Google Realtime Search adds Facebook

Mashable has posted a list of 10 Google search tricks you might not know.

These include using the search bar as a calculator, using it to find public data and carrying out a site search.

Tipster: Sarah Marshall

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link– we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – try Google Correlate
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – How to request a Google+ profile for your news site
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – 30 specialist search engines
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – 50 Twitter chats for journalists
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – How to shorten the URL to your Google+ profile

The Guardian’s Facebook app has been downloaded eight million times since it was launched six months ago, seeing around 40,000 downloads a day.

Speaking at the Guardian Changing Media Summit, Tanya Cordrey, director of digital development at Guardian News and Media, said the news outlet has been “blown away by the results”.

The “frictionless sharing” app works by readers opting in to share all articles they read with their Facebook friends, generating more traffic for the news site with “no editorial curation”.

She later explained that the Guardian has generated more money through ad revenue from the app than the news organisation spent on building it.

Six months ago months ago Google provided 40 per cent of the Guardian’s traffic. The launch of the Facebook app resulted in a “seismic shift” with social exceeding search as a driver on several occasions in February (see above photograph).

Cordrey predicted:

It’s only a matter of time until social overtakes search for the Guardian.

She said that the audience becomes more global everyday, providing “an amazing opportunity to learn about this new audience”.

It’s the audience we want to learn about rather than the platform [Facebook]

Readers are in “habitual grazing mode”, Cordrey said, traffic peaking in “the middle of the afternoon”.

Addressing those who believe the app has implications for privacy, Cordrey said “we are acutely aware of the critics” but readers are not being driven away or removing content they have read from their Facebook timeline.

“Once people have it, they use it,” Cordrey said, explaining “only a tiny percentage of people” have taken up the option of hiding their reading habits.

Earlier in the day Karla Geci, strategic partner development for Facebook said that it would be “just weird and awkward to read a whole article inside of Facebook”, saying Facebook’s role is enabling “distribution and discovery” rather than taking traffic away from publishers.

Asking herself if frictionless sharing “is creepy”, Geci said:

People are quite interested in being an influencer in their circles. Sharing what you are reading is something you did any way.

• Facebook: Guardian app has 3.9m monthly active users
• Hearsay, a non-Facebook way of social news sharing
• Guardian’s Facebook app delivering 1m extra hits a day
• ‘We wanted to make ourselves more Facebookey’, says Guardian
• Citizen journalism site Blottr launches Facebook app

App of the week: Social Searcher

Phones: Android

Cost: Free

What is it? Enables you to search Facebook without logging in

How is it of use to journalists? This Android app by Social Searcher allows you to search Facebook posts, groups and pages without logging in to Facebook.

The app allows you to open links from search results in your Android web browser, sort search results by date/time, sort search results by number of “likes” and filter by country.

• Tool of the week for journalists – Facebook Search
• App of the week for journalists: TweetCaster, a Twitter app with souped-up search
• App of the week for journalists: News360
• App of the week for journalists: Storyful, for curated social media stories
• NPR publishes results of extensive survey on Facebook

App of the week: Greplin

Phones: iPhone

Cost: Free

What is it? An app that allows you to search personal files, calendars, tweets and more.

How is it of use to journalists? Greplin is a fantastic tool which allows you to search your accounts, including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox and LinkedIn.

It’s available via a browser but has an iPhone app which is likely to become one of your most used apps if you use several of the above accounts.

The app will allow you to enter a keyword and find any reference to that word in your personal files.

Mac users are likely to find it almost as useful as Apple’s Spotlight for searching your own documents, tweets and emails.

Greplin users have the option to pay for a premium service and add more accounts, including Delicious. For anyone who uses the bookmarking tool this can be an attractive option as you can easily find articles you bookmarked in relation to a keyword.

• Tool of the week for journalists – Greplin, to search your private files and profiles
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – reporting tools shared at #jiconf
• Tool of the week for journalists – Facebook Search
• App of the week for journalists: TweetCaster, a Twitter app with souped-up search
• Tool of the week for journalists – DocumentCloud, to analyse documents as data

Giving the opening presentation at the Financial Times’ digital media conference in London today, the founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales discussed the power of the free access it offers for content on the site.

He said the “main original vision for Wikipedia” was based on the following quote:

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

He said by following the idea of free access from the beginning, the site, which currently reports around 65 million monthly visitors, saw “a huge amount of traffic”.

He outlined what Wikipedia sees as the most important part of what it does.

We aren’t just talking about cost. We’re talking about free as in speech, not free as in beer … It’s more fundamental than cost.

He added that the power of this “technique” of content dissemination for “growing online presences” is “still not fully understood”.

Wales said when Wikipedia started the mindset for many was “that in order to have successful content, you need unique content no one else had”, and then to erect a paywall or “vigorously pursue people copying content”.

He took the opposite route, with the only requirement being that users of the content have to follow the licence terms, usually meaning attribution to the source.

Lots of people made clone sites, or they would take an article and put in on a blog. It drove over time a huge amount of traffic.

He added that today this continues to be a “big factor” in the volume of links to Wikipedia and its ranking in search results.

When it comes to finding a business model for online content in general, he added that micropayments could be the way forward, in particular for newspapers online.

One of the things I’m very excited about is the rise of the app store, the app model. For the first time we have a very convenient method to pay relatively small amounts of money.

He added that payment for online content had “always been a barrier” in the past.

He said the ability to make an “impulse purchase” is “really important and going to have major impact when we think about content”.

Here are some of the interesting statistics Wales shared with the conference about Wikipedia 11 years on:

• Over 20 million articles in 270 different languages
• Over 3 million articles distributed in English
• Around 150,000 articles in Arabic
• Only two African languages available
• The most popular category in English, Chinese and Japanese languages is popular culture

He added that we are now “in an era when the general public has a voice in a way they never had before”.

But he said there is also a “heavy” responsibility on Wikipedia and its community to “think about quality of Wikipedia”.

• Confirmed: New York Times website will introduce FT-style charging system
• #ftmedia12: Jimmy Wales’s advice for journalists on using Wikipedia
• WSJ confirms paid-for access to news on mobile
• SocialMedia.biz: Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales on nurturing online communities
• Wikipedia: Giles Hattersley’s ‘missing’ Wikipedia page

Tool of the week: Press Pass

What is it? A new tool to allow you to search for journalists on Twitter

How is it of use to journalists? Press Pass allows you to search for journalists on Twitter by “beat, media outlet or region”.

It is not an exhaustive list as yet. For example, there are 400 New York Times journalists active on Twitter, but only 275 listed on Press Pass at the last check.

Journalists can asked to be added by tweeting to say they report on a beat, work for a title or cover a region.

• Tool of the week for journalists: Muck Rack
• The top 10 most-read stories on Journalism.co.uk, 18-24 February
• Tool of the week for journalists – Facebook Search
• Tool of the week for journalists – Greplin, to search your private files and profiles
• Tool of the week for journalists – Formulists (use it before it disappears)

Tool of the week: Searchmetrics Essentials

What is it? A tool to test your news site’s SEO and social rankings

How is it of use to journalists? Searchmetrics is a paid-for tool to allow you to see your site’s SEO and social rankings.

Journalism.co.uk used it to discover the top 10 Twitter and top 10 Facebook stories of 2011.

Full access costs around £150 per month but you can now have limited access for free with last week’s release of Searchmetrics Essentials.

Type in your domain name and you will be able to see your SEO ranking. For example, typing in Journalism.co.uk shows we are number one search result for “journalism jobs” and number one for “journalism”.

• Searchmetrics: Financial Times is news outlet with most Google+ followers
• Tool of the week for journalists – Facebook Search
• Tool of the week for journalists – Topsy, real-time search for the social web
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk: Google site search
• Nieman Journalism Lab: Gawker’s new traffic metric measures ‘reader affection’

David Higgerson, head of multimedia for Trinity Mirror Regionals, has compiled a list of 10 social network search engines for journalists.

It was published last year but provides really handy pointers on social media search tools.

We’ll add Topsy to the list (a previous tip of the day).

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link– we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – use Topsy to search the social web
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – 30 specialist search engines
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – best social media tools for journalists
• Tool of the week for journalists – Topsy, real-time search for the social web
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – apps and tools for ‘facilitating the reporting process’

Topsy is a is search option recommended by Nicola Hughes, Knight-Mozilla Fellow at the Guardian during a workshop on searching social media at last week’s news:rewired conference.

It is also a previous Journalism.co.uk tool of the week.

Topsy is “one of the only Twitter search tools that has Tweets older than two weeks”, Hughes explained.

In order to research and verify images, Hughes advised putting images in to Topsy to see if they have been previously shared.

The full list of mentions of “Topsy” and #newsrw (the conference hashtag) are at this Topsy link.

If you have a tip you would like to submit to us at Journalism.co.uk email us using this link– we will pay a fiver for the best ones published.

• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – how to verify tweets
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – 11 social network search engines
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – 30 specialist search engines
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – experiment with ‘hashtag science’
• Tool of the week for journalists – Topsy, real-time search for the social web

Duedil, which describes itself as the world’s largest database of free company financials, has just finalised a second round of investment from Jonty Hurwitz, the founding CTO of loans firm Wonga.

Duedil is a free tool that all journalists should take a look at, as it provides a hugely valuable way to search for information on company finance, directorships and more.

Duedil’s database lists every company and director in the UK and Ireland allowing anyone to access the information for free.

It has recently added new features including alerting you to which of your LinkedIn contacts may be able to provide information on that company.

In a release, Duedil said it “has ambitious plans to revolutionise the way business information is accessed and used”.

Angel investor Hurwitz, who is investing an undisclosed sum and has a minority stake in Duedil, “has built a team and technology platform that have radically altered the short-term finance market,” the release states.

Founded in 2007 with Errol Damelin, Wonga turned over £74 million in 2009, and is growing every year.

The release states:

With an eye for the next big thing, Hurwitz sees the vast potential for business growth in big data analytics. He will bring both his technical and strategic expertise to Duedil, which he hopes will develop into the premier source of business information in the world.

• Tool of the week for journalists – Duedil, ‘Lexis-Nexis-meets-Google-meets-LinkedIn’
• IBM: Trinity’s Midlands shake-up to save 30 per cent
• #followjourn: @elzan1 – Errol Anderson/journalist
• Makeover for the Telegraph business pages
• Adrian Jeakings will replace John Fry at Archant

Tool of the week: Facebook Search

What is it? A tool that allows you to search Facebook without logging in

How is it of use to journalists? Social media searches have become a key part of newsgathering process. This tool is a search engine for Facebook. It allows you to search if you are not logged in of if you don’t have a Facebook account.

Based on Facebook’s API, it allows you to search posts, photos, people, pages, groups and events.

As well as being useful for searching by keyword, it is also a good way to test to see if the page for your news site comes up in a search.

• App of the week for journalists: Social Searcher, for searching Facebook
• #Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk: Using Facebook, Twitter and Storify for political coverage
• Tool of the week for journalists – Topsy, real-time search for the social web
• Paper.li adds Facebook to social newspaper function
• News sites can now create a branded page on Foursquare