jotsheet

I think by now that just about everyone knows that search engine results are important. Where your site places in Google and Yahoo (and to a lesser extent, MSN) for important terms can make or break it, depending on the industry. People pay big bucks for SEO. People pay big bucks for text advertising, whether it’s AdWords or YPN.

But perhaps the importantance of SERPs—that’s “search engine results page” for the uninitiated—was never clearer to me than when I received an e-mail today from my mother. Mom’s competent enough with getting around the Web and doing word processing, but she doesn’t do much more than that. She’s a typical Internet user. Today, she was doing some research on gas exploration leases, and this is what she wrote:

If you “google” gas fact sheet.pub, you’ll find an informative article from Cornell in New York about gas leases.

Also, if you google shale gas doc, you’ll find interesting info on how they actually extract gas, along with pictures of wells and rigs.

A message board of people discussing gas exploration leasing can be found by googling Naro forum.

I wrote her back and asked why she hadn’t included URLs to the sites she mentioned. The simple answer. She didn’t know how.

I’m not writing to embarrass my mother, of course. (And truth be told, I wrote this up without asking her permission first. Pretty rude of me, eh?) But think about that: the practice of search has so permeated our use of the Web that some users have no idea what a URL is anymore. They speak of sites not in reference to their name, or their URL, but their placement and key terms returned on a Google search.

If you’re a regular reader of the jotsheet, perhaps you’ve been wondering, “What’s the deal with this web host stuff? Has Tom Sherman turned into a hack mouthpiece for a pyramid scheme?”
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My recent move from underscores to hyphens in filenames has caused me a couple of unexpected headaches, but it’s also taught me some interesting things about Apache’s mod_rewrite. I’ve been buried in .htaccess for hours lately, playing detective to strange behavior on my site. My most recent discovery involves the limitations of Apache’s implementation of regular expressions in mod_rewrite. I think the developers were trying to prevent wannabes like me from screwing up their own sites and consuming server resources, but it’s caused me some frustration.

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I’ve become a little too interested in SEO of late, and I learned that hyphens are preferred by Google to underscores. (By the way, many people erroneously label hyphens as dashes; they are two distinct things.)

It seems that Google actually indexes a URL containing sample_phrase as the text jumbled together, or samplephrase. Therefore, for a searcher to find these terms in the URL of your page, he would have to search for the exact text: “sample phrase”. However, with hyphenated URLs (sample-phase), Google properly parses out each individual word, allowing a user searching for sample or phrase to hit that page.

So, with that in mind, I decided to make some changes ’round here to page names. And create a lot of work for myself on a Sunday afternoon.
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