Recently in humour Category

Like a lot of people on this side of the Atlantic, I stayed up until the early hours of this morning to find out who would be president of the USA.

Congratulations to Obama and his team!

I have to admit that I fell asleep before his acceptance speech or possibly during it (no reflection on the quality of the speech, more a reflection of it being after 4am!), but I did get to hear McCain's very gracious speech.

Today's XKCD comic sums it up nicely (click to enlarge):

I don't buy much on Cafepress shops due to the shipping costs, but some of the US presidential stuff is very amusing and quite tempting. I know my mother or sister would get a kick out of some of these:
You can find loads more over on Cafepress

Despair.com (who I mention far too much!) have released yet another tshirt that brought a smile to my face:

It was only a matter of time before the guys in tshirt hell came up with Sarah Palin tshirts...

You can choose from several - it depends on how tasteless you want to be !

Palin's love for guns and hunting gives this one:


While her daughter's pregnancy may have influenced this one:
I wonder has anyone done up masks yet...

Despair.com's tshirts get better and better.

I presume the latest one is inspired by the US presidential elections (click to enlarge):

I have no idea how I got sent a link to this, but it did amuse me.

If you want to access this particular site you will need to solve this mathematical problem first:

Getting your site listed in Google is one thing, getting traffic to your site is another.

What's the difference?

Well basically Google pretty much lists every single webpage on the planet, so getting listed or included isn't really that big a deal.

What you really want is people to go to your site and buy your product or service (or take whatever action you want / need).

Now this is where it gets interesting and complicated.

If someone does a search in Google for my name they'll probably end up here pretty quickly. This has very little to do with SEO. It's basically because I have an odd first name and a rather uncommon surname, so most of the results in Google will refer to me.

With me so far?

Ok, so that shows that searching for something very specific is probably going to take you to it. It might not, but it's more likely.

But what if you are running an online business?

Are people going to look for your business by name?

While that might happen eventually it's highly unlikely that it's going to happen when your site first goes live, or even after that.
What's a lot more likely to happen is that people are going to look for a solution to a problem.

For example, if I want to read a review of the Babylon AD (a film released this week) I have a couple of options.
I could go to a site such as entertainment.ie, filmreviews.ie or movies.ie to see if they've got any reviews OR I could simply do a search on Google for "babylon ad". Since I'm interested in a review of the film I might append that to my search query, so it becomes "babylon ad review".

This isn't rocket science.

However if you deal with small business owners on a regular basis you soon realise one thing. A lot of them don't really understand how to use search engines.
They don't understand the difference between their browser's navigation bar and Google.

What this means in practical terms is that people can get duped by promises of "rapid inclusion" or "top ranking" etc., etc.

If someone promises you "free traffic" how are you meant to understand that?

Will you know that the only traffic you can possibly get from Google from a new site is going to be a spider ie. a bit of computer software that isn't going to buy anything

The devil is in the details, though anyone dealing with small business should be very clear about what exactly they are offering.

Damien wrote up a nice piece covering some of this based on what was being discussed on the Enterprise Ireland Ebusiness mailing list. It's worth reading the comments by the way!

James took the entire fluffy link / Google rapid submission tool idea and threw a quick site together

It all gets quite inane yet amusing, doesn't it?

Hotshots is silly, but it's a wonderfully enjoyable film all the same.

Whoever is behind XKCD is a genius.

Today's gem is pure geek, but linux zealots will appreciate it (click to enlarge):