Well Cardiff was delightful. Visited the castle there. Will post pictures soon. We’ve had a wonderful weekend with Maryam’s brother’s family. Tonight his webmaster came over. John Chinery, managing director of Amicore eBusiness. He does IT and Websites for microbusinesses. We had a great chat about search engines. Turns out my brother’s site is #5 on Google if you search for People’s Poet but is about 23 down on MSN Search (he’s known in town as “bard of the busses” or “the people’s poet.” He’s been linked to from a BBC site and from me, so looks like MSN still isn’t counting blog links as highly as Google is. This demonstrates just how difficult it’ll be to be seen as better than Google. Webmasters are the ones who are authoritative on search engine quality and they are seeing their sites and blogs ranked higher on Google than on Yahoo or MSN. So, of course they recommend Google to their customers. Oh, and John tells me he’s doing blogs for his customers now too since they recognize that blogs do better on search engines than static sites like the one he did for Maryam’s brother.
Oh, I noticed that Keyvan’s title tag is mispelled. He used “peoples” instead of “people’s.” Google didn’t penalize him for that, but MSN did. On Google if you search the way he mispelled it he has the #1 link. On MSN Search he has the #3 link for that term. Which shows just how important having a good title tag matters (the tag that puts the name on the top of the browser). Choose the wrong name and you won’t be found at all. It’s amazing how many bloggers have lame title tags, by the way. It’s like they don’t want to be found at all.
