Beagle murdered. News at 11.

Last December, I finally removed the don't search directive. and opened my site up to the various search engines. Honestly, putting anything in a robots.txt file won't really prevent a spider from crawling a website, and to think the site wasn't being indexed would have been rather naïve. It was being indexed, the results just weren't displayed on Google. Sure, that's 80% of search engine traffic, but the results were displayed in other search engine results.

So, when I did open the website, I set up a few Google Alerts. Google Alerts are lists of new content Google found based on specified search words and phrases. I set up three searches to watch for references to this site: "hodsden", "kitt" and "kitt hodsden".

Now, "kitt hodsden" immediately started returning results to this website. Yay, me!

"hodsden" didn't start returning references to my site for a month or so. Most of results initially, and (honestly) still, were for Lee Hodsden, a cop somewhere in New England, and a Chris Hodsden, a principal for some school somewhere and not my brother.

Results for "kitt" were a mixed bag among K.I.T.T. the car, Earth Kitt the singer, David Kitt another singer, Michael Kitt an Irish politician, Tom Kitt another Irish politician, Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona, kitt.net posts and some kittbo author from somewhere I haven't bothered to find. Note the distinctive lack of the "kitt" of me in that list.

Well, today's alert finally had one of my posts in it:

When I read the extracted part of the post, which is essentially the first sentence or two of the post, I realized, good lord, I take a long time to get to my point when I'm telling a story. I can't say that if I were reading the first two sentences of my posts that I would be inspired to read the rest of the post/article.

One of the many suggestions for writing blog posts (or copy in general) is to write sensational titles to capture attention. Use hot, popular words and say something declarative or even confrontational. I don't know, is it worth it for traffic?

I can't say it is.

I think I'll go back to my boring post titles.

And, no, the girls are just fine. Bella says, "Arooo!" And Annie offers lots of licks to you.