Craig W. Barrett, Hughesville, REALTOR (r)
Hughesville, MD Real Estate
As I watched my oldest son, who is in the sixth grade, complete a Social Studies project on Interdependency of World Cultures, it dawned on me I might be missing something. Not that Peru has a diverse culture, but the search engine that people may be using and where my business was placed.
It was no surprise he used the Internet to find information to complete his project, but he surprised me when he went to Ask.com to find the information he was looking for. I assumed he would use Google. I use Google, why wouldn't he? Like father like son, right? Nope.
I asked why he used it, he said it was easier and it took less time. Less time for what?? I prodded... less time to find what I'm looking for dad. With that look like "you don't use Ask.com?" and a raised eyebrow...
The search results are returned just as quickly, but I think when he said "took less time" he meant the quality of the top results were better. He didn't have to sift through a few results to find his answer, he felt could rely on the top couple of returns confidently.
So I did some searches on Ask.com with terms that I come up on the first page of Google. I was surprised and dismayed I wasn't even on the first couple of pages. Naturally, I began to think about my business and how I optimize for Google and Yahoo. I don't optimize for Ask.com, don't know if the process is similar and don't know if it would make a difference to my bottom line. At the very least I figured, it may give my sellers additional exposure.
Because Google and Yahoo have such a large search engine market share, I suspect the lack of "placement" on Ask.com may not be much of an immediate concern, but it got me thinking my organic results may be lacking "depth".
I thanked my son for the lesson.
Craig,
Thanks for posting the question and please convey my thanks to your son as well. I just did a search on Ask dot com for my relevant search terms and found that I was on page one for my web sites blog. I had not updated that blog posting in over 2 weeks.
So I do not know how I got to page 1 but quickly realized that if I do not update that blog then it will be for not if the posts are stagnant.
Bill - I agree. I am more concerned with my placement on Google and Yahoo, but it got me thinking how my search terms got placed.
Herb - No problem and thanks for the comment I'll let him know you said thanks too.
Have you tried www.mamma.com?
LOL... It's a search engine that combines all search engines... (that's the website a bunch of techies told me to use instead of google and yahoo)