Re: Search Engine habits

Subject: Re: Search Engine habits
From: "Edgar D' Souza" <edgar -dot- b -dot- dsouza -at- gmail -dot- com>
To: "McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 21:57:13 +0530

On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 9:46 PM, McLauchlan, Kevin
<Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com> wrote:
>> Not always. Depending on the popularity of your search terms with SEO
>> specialists and people who want their site out there ahead of
>> everything else... the real meat you want could be on page 3 or later.
>
> I can't imagine anyone _not_ wanting their site to be one of the first
> ones found. Otherwise, why make a site?

No, no, you're looking at it from the wrong perspective :-)
There's THEM... all those people crowding Google to get you to go to
their sites so they can sell you someone else's product with their
extra markup... and variants of that theme. And there's US - the
people doing the searching, who may not really want to find all those
people who want their sites to be found! :-)

A simple example - you're searching for specs on KVM-over-IP switches,
and want the manufacturer's pages rather than the thousand and one
other online stores retailing it - not just because the retailers
usually have a higher price, but because you want the nitty gritty on
each device, to make sure it satisfies the criteria you've been
given.. and the retailer sites usually contain nothing more than a
short blurb that's practically useless as far as tech specs go.

> The search engine algorithms and spiders are keeping up with the SEO
> crowd.
> They don't rank a page highly just because you stuffed in a hundred
> keywords.
> They require the keyword to be used within the text, and the more times
> the better.

Try a simple search like the one quoted above, and see how many
manufacturer pages you get - without pre-knowledge of KVM
manufacturers :-)

> For slightly obscure searches, the big problem is lateral thinking.
> What terms did somebody else use to talk about what I'm looking for
> (when apparently they don't call it what I do...) ? I used to get
> _that_ problem ALL the time when searching for Linux stuff, back in the
> day (a previous century).

Dang - I'm STILL doing it, Jonathan Livingston! Where'd you move on to? :-)
I've found it quite useful to Google for almost all of an error
message, though you find all the "I see this error, what do I do now?"
posts, sometimes you find answers real quick!

> "Oh, you want to remove a directory? Well, obviously the command to
> remove a file is rm, and everything in Linux/UNIX, including
> directories, is a file, so obviously you have to use rd. Obviously." Uh
> huh.

Nuh-uh. It's rmdir if the dir is empty, else rm -fr
:-)

Yes, yes, I know you know that, just... I dunno... happened to know
the answer for once, I guess :)

Cheers
Ed.
---
Edgar D'Souza (http://edgar.b.dsouza.googlepages.com/)
Check out my GIMP-Python "Tear-off" plugin, useful for tech writers,
at: http://registry.gimp.org/node/10977
===
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Follow-Ups:

References:
Search Engine habits: From: McLauchlan, Kevin
Re: Search Engine habits: From: Edgar D' Souza
RE: Search Engine habits: From: McLauchlan, Kevin

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