Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

Grumble grumble grumble ... this is not turning out to be the kind of day I had planned. I had great ideas of spending the day playing with some very interesting search engine stuff for a couple of clients and I would be if it wasn't for lazy surfers.

Admittedly I am doing some work that involves search engines but it's not half as interesting as what I wanted to do and ... as I said a moment ago ... it's all because of lazy surfers.

I had my cup of coffee made on the desk ... I was just opening up a few tools to start some keyword research ... and the phone rang. It was one of our clients who was quite concerned that his new website wasn't "coming up". But it was ... I could see it quite plainly and when I looked for it on a computer at the other end of the office that has a different connection to the Net it was there too.

However, the client was adamant ... he could not see his site ... it wasn't coming up and he wasn't happy. So Steve and I got in the car and drove down to where his business is located at the other end of town hoping all the way that I'd get there and find that the site had suddenly reappeared.

Unfortunately it hadn't but it didn't take me long to track down the problem and it wasn't with anything we had done. Instead, it was what he and his staff were doing to try and access the site and if they're doing it then lots of people all over the planet are doing the same thing too.

Instead of typing his URL into the address bar of the browser my client ... and his staff ... were all typing the URL into the search box on the MSN site and getting a polite little message that told them the site could not be found. Steve muttered something and I knew that he was calling up great reserves of self-control to prevent himself from beating his head on our client's desk.

It kind of makes you feel that way when you build a killer site that's already beginning to work for the client only to find that Bing hasn't crawled it yet so it can't be found when someone searches for it by entering the URL in the search box.

I think if I ever catch anyone teaching people to get to a website by entering the URL into a search box I'll castrate them with a very blunt and very rusty implement.

So Steve is now doing a few little things to encourage Bing to crawl the new sites we've just launched for several clients while I make a note on our new-site checklist to add them to our account in Bing's Webmaster Center. I never thought it was necessary to do that before but obviously there are enough lazy surfers out there to make the effort of encouraging Bing's spiders to find your new sites worthwhile.

And now that's just about all done I just might be able to get back into some keyword research for a couple of very interesting sites we're building. One of the things that really interests me about keywords and keyword phrases is the intent people have when they're searching for those words and terms.

Are they thinking of those words and terms in the same we that we think of them? Are they looking for what we're trying to sell them when they search for those terms? Do the search engines produce search results that perfectly align with what a person might be thinking about and searching for?

It's an interesting question and some of the search results that I've been seeing lately make me wonder if the algorithms that the search engines use have become so complex that they can identify terms that could have a variety of meanings for different people and so serve up a search engine results page that takes into account all of those different intentions people may have.

While many of the single word search terms that people use to find adult sites have no other meaning than what we all know and understand it is quite possible that some multi-word search terms can have several different meanings ranging from totally adult to something a lot more innocent.

Of course that's just going to make it harder to achieve a first page listing for those multi-word terms that we only think of as being adult in nature. If Google sees that the term someone is searching for could have several different meanings then they're going to list adult and non-adult sites and that will reduce the number of spots on the search results page that are available for our sites.

How do you work with a situation like that to ensure that your sites hit the first results page when people who want to see adult sites use a term that has two meanings?’It's something that you should be thinking about because if you fail to achieve those first page spots you could be missing out on a lot of money.