This and That on a Monday
Posted On: 2010-04-05
It's Easter Monday and that means that it's a public holiday here in Australia. Sadly, even though we live here, that doesn't mean we get that time off. When you work for yourself you have to work when there's work around and right now there's plenty of work around for us.
I'm currently building another online shop for a client while Steve is wrestling with some interesting keyword phrases for a client. Steve's problem isn't knowing which keywords and keyword phrases to use ... he's certainly done plenty of research ... his problem is that the first couple of pages of Google's search results for those terms is populated with a lot of government and education TLDs and they all have plenty of links and plenty of age.
And those are things that the site Steve is working on doesn't have.
Are you backing up everything?
Now if you've been reading my columns for any length of time I'm sure that you will have come across numerous reminders from me to back up everything ... at least once a week ... and in at least two different places.
If you haven't heard me talk about the importance of backing your files up then let me tell you that you should. Not only should you back up your files but you should back them up in places other than the computer that they reside on.
That may sound like basic common sense but you would be surprised at how many people come into the computer shop that we share office space with and almost cry because their computer has died and so have their backups. But then that's what you should expect when all they've done is back up their files on a separate partition on their hard drive.
So if you don't want to lose valuable files make sure you back them up to an external hard drive and even burn a copy onto CD.
You also need to be sure to backup all your important files and it's quite likely that you have several important files that use every day but haven't thought about. A couple of weeks ago the hard drive in Steve's old machine died but not before it gave us some warning. Steve backed up all his important files just in the nick of time ... or he thought he did.
Two important files that he never even thought about were his font file ... he had collected lots and lots of fonts on that computer ... and his bookmark file for his browser. Like his font file ... there were lots and lots of bookmarks that he lost.
So when you do your backups don't forget those two very important files.
Searching with intent
Over on Porn Resource today I talked at length about that project that Steve is working on. It's quite involved ... even though the site is fairly basic ... because we have to get the keywords and keyword phrases right so our client has some hope of achieving some good search engine listings for his site.
I'm not going to repeat myself here but there is one thing that is worth mentioned and that's user or searcher intent. When you're looking at popular search terms for a website that you may be building what were the searchers thinking about when they searched for those terms.
It's easy to look at search terms through our own eyes ... it's a popular term ... it's used to find sites like the one your building ... so everyone who uses that particular term must be looking for the kind of site you're building ... right?
Well ... not all the time and when it comes to some terms perhaps more people are using that search term to find something other than what you think they might be and that means that sometimes those big search numbers you see for some terms can be misleading.
Many people start of their search session by looking for a fairly broad term and then gradually refine their search term till they find what they're looking for. That can mean that while you're targeting a broad term and fighting hard for a good listing searchers may go straight over your listing because it really doesn't have anything to do with what they're really looking for.
When you're aware of searcher intent it soon becomes obvious that perhaps you should let listings for some of those broad terms be fought over by others and while they're wasting their time on those broad terms you can make more money by targeting terms that have fewer searches but that clearly show searcher intent.
And that's it for Monday, see you all on Thursday.