Do you Utube?
Search keywords are very important, most recently illustrated by utube.com owner Ralph Girkins. He complains that YouTube is ruining his website's business. Universal Tube and Rollerform Equipment Corp (his company) can't seem to conduct business because the popular video sharing site is hogging the spotlight. From what he said in an interview, it sounds like he doesn't know how to optimize his search engine keywords and meta information, but still I can see how YouTube may be slurping up all "his" traffic anyway. Let's think about this for a second, isn't this why we have such thing as a URL? Why is it that he can't direct customers to his actual website? If people search for what he is selling or for his company name, they won't get YouTube. I'm not saying I don't feel sorry for him, but come on, use your URL. He needs to broadcast the correct URL to all his customers. Every other site in the world does it. Perhaps hire a SEO expert to help your standing in the ranks of Google, etc. I did a google search for "utube." His listing is the first one, so why is this an issue? YouTube isn't going way soon, so deal with it.
UPDATE: Our readers have spoken. Apparently, the problem isn't so much that Ralph's customers have the wrong URL, but more that his site is being overloaded with misdirected traffic, due to Google buying YouTube, and people flocking to the wrong site. I still say Ralph doesn't seem to know what he is talking about asking Google to host his site, or that he got 68 million hits in August (which would mean his site could handle the traffic with no problem), so I still think he needs help in the web department. What he should do is buy more bandwidth from his host to keep his site online, and serve up Google ads to capitalize on the problem. Thanks to Franklin, Chris, and Greg R for pointing this out.
