SEMblog

Last year I was playing around with Google Custom Search, to try and improve the search functionality on amset.info.

While I was experimenting, I built custom search engines for the knowledgebase's of Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee, Palm, Apple, Adobe and a few others.

Rather than waste the work I had done, I put them in to some rough web code I use for basic web sites, registered a domain name and put it on its own virtual server on the same server that hosts amset.info and this site.
The link initially appeared in one place only, on this site. You will find it in the side bar. I have subsequently added it to my profile on Experts Exchange. It will most likely appear linked to from amset.info when I eventually get round to a design refresh for that site.

It will now appear in a third place, here: http://www.kbsearch.info/

If you look at the site you will see that it isn't the prettiest of code. It was built on some standard asp that I use if I need to throw together something very quickly. I use most of the asp as place holders for a real design to be done at a later date.
I did some basic meta tags, put in the Google Adsense code and left it at that.

Came as a bit of a surprise then to look at the logs for the web site a few weeks later to find that not only has Google indexed it, but it was for a time also at the top of the results (at least on Google UK) for a certain keyword - Symantec KB. It now seems to vary between 1 and 3.

If you believe some of the hype around the Search Engine Optimisation community (SEO) what has happened should not have happened. I should have had lots of links to the site, monitored my keyword density, done the research, crafted my meta tags, used the keywords in the title etc. I also shouldn't have the site name in the title.

I did none of the above. I have probably got lucky with what I did use, but it was just luck. I am not aware of any inbound links (except from here) and the pages are not optimised in any way.

I am not saying that SEO is a waste of time and money, just that it in this scenario it was not required to get the site in to the search engines in a good position.