While scrolling through Matt’s conference notes, I’ve stopped for a second at his name and contact information slide. Two slides actually. The first one has the name “Matt Mullenweg” and a picture of him a few years back (either that, or a totally strange other boy). The second one has the URL to his website – photomatt.net and a quick tip on how to find it – Google “matt“.
Now it’s that last bit that caught my attention. I saw it before, but never thought about how nice it is. Google for “matt” is much easier to remember than “photomatt.net” or “Matt Mullenweg”. Isn’t it?
Well, it would be nice if it was so simple and effective for everyone. But it’s not.
My blog used to come up within the first ten or so results when Googling for “Leonid”. But nto anymore, and righteously so – there are more important Leonids. Like “Leonid Brezhnev” and “Leonid meteor shower“.
My surname though is pretty unique. If you Google for “mamchenkov”, you get exactly what you should. But the problem is that noone can remember “mamchenkov”. And half of those who can, can’t type it in correctly.
So, I tried to find a shorter way of looking myself up. The experiment with chopping some letters off my surname didn’t work out:
- mamchenkov – ideal, but nobody can remember this.
- mamchenko – nobody can remember this, and it doesn’t work anyway.
- mamchenk – only 3 results, but all of them are related to me. Nothing direct though.
- mamchen – nothing for me, but a bunch of results overall. One of them is this funny doll.
- mamche – chance. Mamche.com is a popular classifieds portal in Bulgaria.
- mamch – nothing for me, loads of international stuff, and a suggestion to search for “match” instead.
- mamc – these four letters have less to do with my surname than I thought.
- mam – to say the least, this is a very popular abbreviation.
- ma – 1,560,000,000 results. My life is too short to page forward to see if I am 1,560,000,000 or 1,559,999,999…
- m – this is the title of the movie, that has been building up its Google rating since 1931. Obviously, I’m not in it.
Mkay… so much for the surname.
I’ve played some more with Google results, and the shortest string that people can actually remember, seems to be “Leonid Cyprus” (“Leonid in Cyprus” works the same way). This one is OK for now, but I’ll have to work on something better.
What’s the easiest way to find your website?
“Sue Cyprus” (without quotes) or “Sue in Cyprus” (with or without quotes) finds my blog. Scary, as I’m sure there are many other Sues in Cyprus who must be a bit annoyed to find me more easily findable than they are.
If you google “Constantinos” I am on page 3 for now. If you google “image2post” I am the first hit, same goes for “current-mood” not first hit though first page.
And the strangest if you google “ilovems” I am the second result. And I don’t even like MS not love it :D.
Guess how to get your site in google could probably qualify as a post by itself… I remember some other key factors are the keywords in the URL itself, and the keywords within Titles and Headings. There are plenty of articles that explain this, including some on google bombing (eg google for miserable failure) :mrgreen:
Hi Sanjay,
“how to get your site in google” is a topic of many books. It’s one of the hottest issues in technology today. :)
My focus is more on a “best way to remember how to find your website” topic.