Google says they may change page titles if they’re too short, used across several pages on your site, keyword stuffed, or not unique or compelling.

Any good SEO will tell you the importance of page titles. They may be the number one on-page item other than the site’s content itself. So it certainly makes sense that you would want to have titles that are unique, compelling, sufficiently descriptive to help visitors and not keyword stuffed, but it’s odd, creepy and a bit unnerving to think that Google is making these judgements on our behalf. (Something tells me it’s not our best interests they’re looking out for …)

Most importantly, it’s just plain wrong for them to do this without alerting site owners. I’d also argue that it’s wrong for them to do so without telling searchers/visitors that a change has been made.

Taking a ramble down the speculative path:

• On what basis do they make these decisions?
• Are the changes made similarly across all sites ranking for a given keyword?
• Do they favor sites with big AdWords spending? I haven’t seen any evidence of that, but it is hard not to wonder.

I know there are lots of people who view Google as a healthier, more open alternative to the closed systems that companies like Apple push. (And that Microsoft pushed in the past, and that Amazon and others are trying to push going forward.) I’m neither a huge fan nor huge hater of Google, but this seems like one more piece of evidence that maybe the “don’t be evil” mission statement got pushed aside at some point.

As with any database-driven site, you cannot expect to build a WordPress site and leave it as is over an extended period of time. As vulnerabilities are exposed, your site becomes more and more at risk of being hacked.

Hacking can take many forms, but all are a danger to you and potentially your visitors. Since most modern browsers are sophisticated enough to detect threats, your site visitors may be warned away from your site. Clearly that’s not going to be good for business.

Here are some steps you can take to keep your WordPress site secure. (Note: most of this applies to installed WordPress site; sites hosted at WordPress.com have much of this taken care of automatically.)

• Stay up to date – security patches are generally released in response to new known threats, so it makes sense to install them as quickly as you can. Be sure, though, that the update is compatible with all the plugins and widgets being used on your site.
• Check in on your site – Believe it or not, there are people who never visit their own sites. Check in regularly so that if there is a problem, you stand a chance of being the first to know. This isn’t something you want to hear from prospective clients.
• Safeguard passwords and logins – minimize the number of people who have access to your servers and your administrative dashboard. Also be sure that everyone has his or her own login so you can track trouble back to the source. If you can get your team to cooperate, mandate password updates at least twice a year. It’s a hassle, but it’s an added layer of protection. And consider eliminating the default admin account. An admin account with a different is much more secure – hackers will have to guess not just the password, but the user name, too.
• Back up regularly – you’ll sleep better knowing you can recover from a destructive attack without losing a lot of time or data.

There are a number of security plugins available that can help you monitor your site, too, but we prefer sticking with tried and true methods that we know do not impact site performance. As some of these tools become more mature – and we’ve had the opportunity to test them more completely – we’ll be more comfortable recommending them.

• Keeping your WordPress site safe
• Keeping your Drupal site safe
• (Added bonus) Keeping your mobile phone safe

Today, let’s focus on Drupal.

Top of the list for best practices for Drupal security is keeping your site up to date. Though you may feel a maintenance agreement is an unnecessary expense, especially if you are new to Drupal site, any database-driven site is going to require  more work than the “code and ignore” that you can frequently get away with when you have a simple, static HTML site.

We spoke with one of our colleagues, Shane Larrabee at FatLab, which provides support for a range of CMS systems.

“Maintaining a secure Drupal site is a proactive and reactive job. We monitor the Drupal security advisories (http://drupal.org/security) for both the Drupal core and contributed modules, and recommend updating whenever patches become available, and we help our clients handle any issues they may encounter while using their sites.”

There are also a number of non-technical best practices that you can handle without any technical help.

• Visit your website – sounds funny, but the number clients we’ve heard who don’t think to check their own sites regularly is pretty astounding. No-one knows the site better than you and your team. Make sure it’s working as you expect.
• Keep passwords and logins safe – limit the number of people who have access, be sure every team member has his/her own login so you can track down problems more easily. We know it’s kind of inconvenient, but changing passwords regularly makes good sense, too.
• Eliminate the default admin account. Leaving it in place means hackers only have to get your password – you’ve already given them your user name …

Shane points out another reason to keep your site up to date.

“Though most security patches are made without issue, allowing a site to become horribly out of date greatly increases the chances that an update will require a larger (and more expensive) effort.”

Stay current, stay safe, and your site should remain immune to attacks of every stripe.

And don’t forget to back up regularly! If things do go wrong, life’s a lot less stressful if you can roll back to the version of the site you had live yesterday. Talk to you developer or hosting provider for details on how the site is being safeguarded.

If you have a company page on LinkedIn, you can segment the folks who are linked to you and send messages just to the segments you choose. More targeted content makes it more likely that your content resonates with your audience and less likely that your messages get deleted unread. (If you inundate your audience with off-topic material, they’re going to start ignoring you …)

The video in this post from The Next Web does a great job of explaining it.

As I posted a few weeks ago, far more people send and read email than watch videos, use social media, or read blogs.

B To B Online has just published research that backs this up.

As their pull quote puts it, “Email marketing is considered the workhorse of b-to-b marketing… email remains the bedrock of customer communications, transactional messages, and lead generation.”

I think this comes down to mindset – even for the younger generation of “digital natives.” That  mindset is that most people view social media as a social place. A cocktail party. Perhaps even a bit of a free-for-all. And though people every once in a while say something publicly they wish they hadn’t, usually they draw a pretty bright line between things they’ll discuss publicly and things that are more private in nature.

Email is the private counterpart to social media’s public communication.

Marketers can profit from that mindset by using email marketing to create the immediacy and, in some cases, intimacy, that is out of place in social media. More personal messages, messages with content segmented to tightly address a recipient’s needs, are going to perform better here than general messages, and will perform better in email than in social media, where the immediacy can be lost.

Email still works, and marketers who are ignoring it in favor of social media are leaving a lot on the table.

The tools sounds as if it might be similar conceptually to WordPress – templates and other tools would make basic development accessible to the masses, but you’d still need to know your way around some coding to fully customize your app. The engine in this case is JavaScript.

More exciting would be a tool that makes it easier to program once and publish many – platforms that is. Not that Apple would ever develop such a thing, but it would be wonderful not to have to code separately for iOS, Android and now, the Windows mobile platform.

Here are a few interesting articles on the subject:

Video Top Asset Created for Content Marketing
Social media and video are a tough combination to beat.

Content Marketing Strategies With Web Video and Social Media
A quick how-to overview.

HTMLvideo.org
HTML5 makes going mobile easier for video content.

Invodo: Video Statistics: The Impact of Video
A treasure trove of statistics for online video’s power.

IKEA Expands Content Marketing With Launch of YouTube Channel
One of many YouTube-related examples.

There are two reasons you should be actively searching the web for content: curation opportunities and inspiration.

Curation Opportunities
Particularly when you’re getting started, creating new content from scratch can be daunting. Even when you’re established, sometimes the time crunch wins and you need to knock out something in less time than you’d like. That’s no excuse for putting out low quality content. Finding content that is of interest to your audience and commenting on it not only provides them with valuable information, but can showcase your expertise without overtly selling. Having great content ready to comment on is key to make the process efficient.

Inspiration Opportunities
Gathering content can also provide you with inspiration for creating your own. Perhaps you notice a trend around a particular topic, or see a division developing between different camps on a subject. You can don your reporters cap and provide coverage to your audience. Actually, it’s a columnist’s cap rather than a reporter’s, since you’ll be providing commentary. That’s where the real value is for both your audience, who gets your insights, and you, since you once again get to showcase your expertise.

So how exactly do you go about gathering all this great content? Well, you could go out and actively search for content on the web every day, but that’s time consuming and can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Much easier is putting an army of zombies of robots to work for you.

Well, more robots than zombies. Things like Google Alerts and RSS feeds are a great way to have content land in your inbox on a daily basis. Here’s an introduction to a few tools you can use.

Google Alerts
A great tool from Google, free as usual, that lets you define a keyword term and other parameters and delivers to you via email links to newly published content related to your keyword term.

Twitter Search
Particularly good for topical information, you can see what’s hot right now. There are a variety of Twitter search and monitoring tools you can also use.

RSS Feeds
One of my favorites. It’s easy to find great blogs about topics of interest. What’s hard is getting yourself back to them when they publish new information. RSS readers bring that content to you and typically you can categorize and organize it as you’d like. Google Reader is my reader of choice, but there are many others.

Email Newsletter Subscriptions
So last century, but still so valuable. Be sure to set up a separate email account or filter of some kind to keep the deluge from getting out of control, and only subscribe to reputable newsletters. Some newsletters can also be subscribed to via RSS.

Summary
I’ve purposely not listed all the tool options here – summarizing and evaluating each would create for a much longer post – but with the info above you can do some searching of your own and find great tools that will get you started on the content gathering trail.