On 29/06/07, Sander Aarts <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Sorry, Sander, but that logic escapes me. Of course I don't know what > goods a certain company sells if I don't know they exist. But I know > what goods I'm looking for, so that's what I'll search on. Sometime you're not looking for goods, but just for the company/organisation.
That's true, but since your company name is likely to be far more unique than whatever product/service you're providing, the chances are you'll rank well for it anyway. But I guess it comes down to what you feel (preferably backed up by a bit of research) your target audience is likely to be looking for you by. Are you launching a huge, multi-million dollar branding campaign aimed at making your company name a household word? Then maybe emphasising your branding on the site by putting it in <h1> tags is the way to go since you are hoping to get people familiar enough with your name that it's what they'll throw at a search engine when they want to find you. Otherwise, the chances are that your products/services are what you're hoping to use to draw people in. In which case the fact that you sell Product Y is of far more importance to searchers than the fact that you're called Company X.
>> Not always. If I want to know what campagnes Amnesty International is >> currently running, I don't want to search for every undemocratic >> country in the world. > You search for the goods or services that you want - don't you? > > Not if you know how to use a search engine, no. And you're presuming > that I know that Amnesty International exists - which is the whole > point. What if I don't? I'd search on "human rights abuses". Again, sometimes you want to find info about the organisation itself. And yes, that means that you already know it exists. But not all organisations have very distinctive/unique names. Some have these horrible innitials that can mean anything on the web.
I have no hard data to back this up, but I would guess that most web surfers these days understand enough about searching to know that if you have a generic-type word you are looking for (or if the results simply don't give you what you want) then you add some extra terms to narrow the field. And if you already know the name of the organisation, the chances are you at least know a little bit about what they do and so know the sort of things to add to your search. But once again it comes back to my first point, and the acknowledgement of the fact that you can't please 100% of the people 100% of the time. Work out what is most important for a given organisation / site and go with that option. Just some random thoughts from me, anyway. :) Cheers, Seona. ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
