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If you wanted to get a good idea of the problem you face getting found in cyberspace you might try getting away from the city and looking up at the sky on a clear night. From any one place you are able to see somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 to 2,500 stars. Another 2,500 to 5,000 stars are actually visible in the Milky Way, but that is only a tiny fraction of the 100 billion stars the galaxy holds. When you search the Internet you typically see a results page for 10 results of the more than 20 billion documents that are out there.

If you have ever tried to pick out the North Star you can imagine that it would be nearly impossible without the big dipper. Luckily drawing a line between the two “pointer” stars at the front of the Big Dipper leads you to the North Star.

The job that search engines perform is similar to the guidance that the pointer stars offer. They get you in the vicinity of what you are looking for. Actually, the pointer stars probably do a slightly better job than search engines are able to. It would be nice if search engines could find you exactly the information you are looking for and put that document in the number one position and then give you all the rest of the documents like that in descending order, but they can’t.

Consider a searcher who enters the search term (keyword) mustang. What is this person searching for? Google appears to think it is more likely than not that they are searching for something to do with the vehicle Ford makes. On the day this was written there was also one result for motorcycle seats and one for survival suits in the top ten results. Sorry, if you were doing research on horses or looking for the town of Mustang Oklahoma you’ll have to refine your search, dig deeper or try another search engine.

The good news is you don’t need to know the inner workings of search engines or be mathematician or even an engineer to show up at the top of their search results where 85% of all Internet users turn for the information they seek from the Web.

Reading this blog and following the advice in it can’t guarantee that you will show up for a given keyword term, but it will certainly increase your chances. I’d suggesting using the categories as a guide for your explorations here. And remember you can always drop me a line.