Keywords That Led To You

Just for fun, every month when I look at my stats I take a look at the complete list of key words/phrases that I have been found with and sometimes the strangest keywords show up in the report. These are not keywords that appear on my blog with any frequency or have a whole lot of relevance to anything.

Here is my top 10 list of strange keywords that I have been found for.

"140 pound condom"
" is Elton John bald" (I figured this one out)
"can you show me pictures of bald girls"
"4794279" (among many other 7 digit numbers)
"big pooty"
"mini clapping bald eagle"
"mark eating cactus"
"is chuck norris bald"
"delay carpet cleaning and worry about downtime"
"lobster boy server blog"

But the one that I am most shocked about is, "big bald men." I mean seriously, what does that have to do with me?

Here's what I want to know. What are some keywords that have brought people to your site, and I am talking unintentional. I am not talking about you setting out to capture the "poop deck pappy" or "the dingle droppers" traffic by optimizing for those words.

Let me know what you have found. I will collect them all and may even give the winner a text link to your site, not that its worth a whole lot but it's something right?

 

Taxing The Internet?

Expiring in November, the Internet Tax moratorium is receiving a lot of industry attention. "The current Internet tax moratorium is one policy that Congress has enacted to help make the internet a universally accessible, free, and open platform capable of delivering a rich variety of services to consumers." - From Google's Public Policy Blog

Amazon.com, Yahoo, eBay and Google are joining forces with the crew at Don't Tax Our Web
a group that is dedicated to 3 main principles:

"1. Keeping Internet access services free of all federal, state and local transaction taxes;

2. Preventing the imposition of duplicative and discriminatory taxes on e-commerce; and

3. Avoiding the imposition of hidden taxes on consumers of Internet access."

The moratorium currently in place "...prohibits three things: state and local taxation of Internet access, multiple taxes on a single e-commerce transaction, and taxes that discriminate against online transactions."

Google's public policy blog states: "Keeping Internet access tax-free is also another way that government can help further the growth of the web to all corners of the U.S. At a time when American policymakers are working to increase broadband penetration rates and improve the quality of broadband services to consumers, we believe that increasing barriers to access -- whether they are created by the government or by the private sector -- will only frustrate our common goal of greater access to better broadband for all consumers."

OK, here's my 2 cents worth. Google and all the other major players in the Internet game are all for the surface issues that stir up instant emotions with the general public. Buzzwords like an "internet tax" will sure get the natives restless, especially when they are paying $60.00 a month for broadband service from the only provider they have to choose from.

But wait! Isn't the cost of Internet the big issue here. What about the slow broadband speed America has to endure compared to the rest of the world? Aren't we really talking about Net Neutrality. You can't pick and choose what element of Net Neutrality you're willing to participate in. You have to support the entire package or not at all. If you are going to promote the non-taxation of the Internet, then you need to be out there lobbying for the expansion of broadband access to US consumers.

Remember the $200 million dollars in tax breaks the telecom industry received for the purposes of developing the infrastructure in the US? Ohhh yeah, they pocketed that money as profits. This, ladies and gentlemen, is why you only have 2 poor choices of Internet access in most locations. This is why your broadband connection only operates at 3.5 down. One could argue, "...that extending the moratorium should come with conditions to motivate investments in technology that will reach more people, including the rural population, with real broadband service.

To Google, AT&T and all the other big players, I say don't cherry pick what you want to support. Be a part of the solution.

What do you think?

 

That Flash is Pretty Flashy

So I get an email from a guy wanting an evaluation on his flash site before it goes live. The site is a well put together design and very visually appealing. The one problem is that there is no content, visual, HTML or otherwise. It is basically one big flash movie broken up into little flash movies accessible by the "mystery meat" navigation.

He told me that he wanted to make sure that his site was "found" on the Internet and that was the primary goal. I referenced countless articles that spoke about SEM and how flash was best used as elements within the site, including a post on Google's Webmaster Central Blog that said "Try to use Flash only where it is needed..." Linking strategies aside, I told him that "content was king" and how compelling and properly written content with appropriate key word density would yield better results than a flashy looking website.

The next day I got an email from his web designer that said I was "horribly wrong" and if "the design sucks then content will not mean anything." He went on to say that flash has been the SEO standard since October of 2004. To which I retorted, "ohh yeah, I forgot about that" and left it at that.

According Johnathan Hochman there are ways to make flash sites "spiderable" but not may designers will do it. Johnatan Hochman also concedes that, "A site built entirely with Flash suffers a great disadvantage because it lacks page structure to organize the content, internal linking, and unique page titles. One remedy is to create distinct HTML pages to represent each Flash "page,"... Most SEO expert agree that flash should be used as elements in HTML pages where spiders can glean the information and return home with real content.

Your comments are welcome!

 

Google Still on Top

ComScore recently reported that Google now has an incredible 50.7% of the search market. This is an increase from the last reported number at just over 47%. This means that, of the searches performed in the US, 3.9 billion are being done with Google.

Yahoo dropped to 26.8%, MSN was at 10.3%, Ask came in at 5% and Time Warner (AOL) finished at the bottom of the heap with a paltry 4.6%.

Where is it going to stop? How big can Google get? Let me just throw this out there...What happens when/if Google gets so big that they have end up having 90% or more of the searches? Will the government step in and break them up like they did with AT&T or impose some anti-trust legislation like what happened to Microsoft?