Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Search Engines — Miffed at Google

My most recent (and one of my favorite) beach stone wind chimes. A very large, smooth and rounded, Pacific beach stone. The connections pass right through the stone, so Very strong. Five heavy copper chimes with a beach stone clapper. Tung nut oiled red cedar. On eBay now.

Until I made my own website I didn't pay attention to search engines, other than using Google dozens of times a day. For me, Google was it. It seemed to work okay, most often.

But once I had my own site up and running, I entered the mind boggling world of search engine optimization, or SEO as those in the field call it. Those not in the field, or who only dabble like me, might more often refer to it as ABN, or A Bloody Nightmare. ABN is the art / science / shot-in-the-dark of using text, mega tags, and design to have your site reach higher and higher on the search engine indexing results for important key search words. Important stuff, because if your site is not found, it might as well not exist.

After three months, I have been fairly happy with the steady indexing improvements for my site on Yahoo and MSN Search, but distressed by the indexing, or lack of, on Google. For a month or so, things seemed to be improving, and then, bang, something happened and I lost most of the progress I had been making on Google. That stinks. It doesn't seem right that unless you have a PhD. in SEO, or hire some company for hundreds of dollars, you can so easily fall off the search results.

That got me looking at other search engines. There is a very cool new one that has totally wowed me. It's called hakia. It's different, and it's Great! If you haven't tried haikia, I highly recommend giving it a whirl.

Hakia is now my favorite search engine. And yes~ from a quick look, I like how my site seems to be indexed there. And no, this is not a 'paid for' posting.



2 comments:

  1. Anonymous2:38 AM

    Google change their algorithms regularly, so trying to get high rankings can be a bit of a random affair. You'll probably find that in a month or two they'll change the algorithm again in a way more favourable to you. :)

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  2. Thanks, alden~ I sure hope so! I'm reworking the content and mega tags too, so we'll see.

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