Searching for Ram

December 29, 2006 being the last working day of the year, it has been a slow, lazy and bleatingly sleepy work day.

After accomplishing stuff I had intended to accomplish so far, I decided to while away some minutes by engaging in a search marketing exercise to find out if this blog (yep, the one you’re reading) is getting popular in the search engine. And just out of curiosity, find out what websites are affiliated with my name.

But first, to those unaccustomed to search marketing … the word search marketing (other experts term it SEM – search engine marketing) refers to the measurable way of finding out the popularity of a certain website by the way it ranks in the search engines. The higher you rank in the search engines, the better your chances of getting read or opened (or at least clicked before the visitor realizes the website he’s visiting is a marketing sell). Ah, search engines kamo? Search engines refer to those websites that act as online guides. You know them – Yahoo!, Google, and MSN are the most popular.

According to online marketing experts, if your website gets listed in the search engines in the first FIVE pages, you’re doing something correct in your search marketing. Landing in the early pages of a search query means your keywords are working, your website is tagged and coded correctly, you’re using the correct meta tags, your site is flowered with strategically-placed keywords, your keyword-purchases are working for you, your web pages are being crawled by robots (no joke!) and that your site submissions to search engines have finally been acknowledge (otherwise the robots won’t crawl to your pages, again, no joke!).

All of these work together in the scheme of search engine marketing. SEM is already considered a discipline on its own, a distinct facet of the total online marketing conundrum.

So, what does this have to do with a lazy afternoon on the bloody last working day of the week?

Well, I decided to enter the search query “ram ragandan” in the three popular search engines to see what sites are related to it.

On Yahoo, a search of “ram ragandan” results in:

ONE: Lo, and behold, “The Coffee House Chronicles” – the search results in a direct link to this blog! (www.ramragandan.blogspot.com)

TWO: The second entry is a link to my registration in The Philippine Tolkien Society (www.thephilippinetolkiensociety.org/society.php?sect=memberscat&cat=R)

THREE: A link to the MegaSportsWorld Newsletter of which my name frequently appears as one of the bylines (http://promos.megasportsworld.com/news/August2006/index.html)

Going over to Google, the results of a search query of “ram ragandan”, the top three results are as follows:

ONE: A link to my Blogger Profile (www.blogger.com/profile/11432379)

TWO: A link to one of my previous blogs in The Coffee House Chronicles on the music that I listen to (http://ramragandan.blogspot.com/2006/08/rams-listening-list.html)

THREE: Another link to a previous post (http://ramragandan.blogspot.com/2006/05/marketing-101-working-with-copy-for.html)

So now, moving on to MSN, the results of a search of “ram Ragandan” results in the following:

ONE: A link to my registration in TPTS (http://www.thephilippinetolkiensociety.org/society.php?sect=memberscat&cat=R)

TWO: The search engine submission I did for MegaSportsWorld in the local search engine INFO PHILIPPINES (http://www.infophilippines.com/megasportsworld.html)

THREE: An identical link to number two (www.infophilippines.com/popular.html)

Cool!

Other results in the three search engines include job postings I made on the UP Diliman website when I was still with PJ Lhuillier, more MegaSportsWorld Newsletter listings, more MegaSportsWorld website registrations with local search engines, and more references to TPTS and blog posts.

Wala lang.