If you’re looking for information about businesses or services on the Internet, you may (like 85% of Internet users) start your search off by using a search engine. Search engines are amazing tools that are designed to retrieve and display information.

Getting the results you want
To get the most relevant results from search engines, you need to be quite specific about the ‘keyword search phrase’ you type into the search box. In this example, you have decided to use NZS.com to help you find out where you can buy piano music at a reasonable price. You are based in Christchurch (the city in New Zealand, not the town in England). The words you might choose to include in your search term would then be: “second hand piano music christchurch”.

By being so specific about your search, the search engine can pull up what it considers to the best and most relevant result to answer your query.

Searching for New Zealand Web sites
If you’re interested in searching for a New Zealand service or company, NZS.com itself is a great place to start, but Google is still the world’s favourite search engine and comes in hundreds of different varieties. Google NZ offers the option to search New Zealand Web pages only, so you can start narrowing your search field that way.

Read more about keyword phrases and using them in your search engine marketing campaigns. More on this in another post! Adios!

NZS.com has dedicated a lot of time to finding New Zealand online content. It’s become evident to us that a lot of Kiwi sites are jolly hard to find. We regularly meet people at events etc that hand us their business card with their Web site on it. You take a look and see the site has no Google PageRank. This is generally because their site has no links to it from anywhere on the Web at all!

It’s a real shame to see this, because often they’ve spent thousands of dollars creating a site that looks pretty swish. It’s just marketing money down the drain, and in the end gives the Web a bad rap. I can imagine them saying at some point “We’ve spent a lot of time and money developing this site, but we get nothing much out of it, the Web is a waste of time.”

To stop your Web site being invisible, make sure you get it linked from high profile directories and content sites. What’s the point of having a site if people can’t find you?! Also, if you’re a bit more serious about it, then commit to an ongoing Web site promotion program - for most Web sites this is the key to getting a good return on your investment.

What’s your style when looking for information online? Do you prefer to search and view results, or would you rather browse from a categorised selection of listings?

NZS.com is a search engine and a directory, which means you can browse as well as search for New Zealand websites. With the fad for instantly gratifying search (seen by some as an easier option), it’s easy to forget that browsing can be a great way to find exactly what you’re looking for. We offer a clear, intuitive, easy-to-navigate directory structure, with thousands of categories. We’ve got everything from outdoor education and personal chefs, to dairy farming, wedding venues and adventure tours!

It’s best to browse when…you know a little about your subject matter. Think of it like going to a library section where there’s a whole shelf of books on a particular topic. Say you’re looking for reiki (you know what reiki is and you want to find a local practitioner). You browse to the main Health category, click on the Alternative Health subcategory and, voila, there’s a Reiki category listing all New Zealand reiki practitioners.

It’s s best to search when…you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, or you’re unfamiliar with your subject matter. Let’s say you search for ‘reiki’ (it’s something you’ve heard of, but you have no idea where you might find it). Your search results tell you there are many relevant listings. You can also see that there’s a whole category devoted to Reiki in the directory, where you can browse all available listings in one place.

So you see, searching and browsing offer two different paths to the same end. The NZS.com directory combines the two - so you can enjoy the best of both worlds!

Search engines are basically computer programs that search the Internet for Web sites. With over 85% of people using search engines to start their Internet sessions and about 81% of these people finding NEW Web sites via search engines, you can see why search and search engines mean big business.

You may have heard of ‘little-known’ engines like Google, Yahoo! and Live Search (formerly MSN)? Well, as you may have guessed, Google is the big enchilada of search engines with over 80% of New Zealand searchers using it to find Web sites and images. It’s important then, that Google likes your Web site so you can get in front of people online. Your next question is probably something along the lines of, ‘how does my Web site get loved up by Google?’

What search engines like Google go for
There are lots of factors to consider, but here are a few of the things about Web sites that search engines like Google tend to prefer:

• Sites that make their content accessible to spiders or robots (programs that index the Internet)
• Sites publishing lots of unique, relevant and interesting content
• Sites that offer a lot of textual content and aren’t heavily graphic or Flash laden
• Sites with lots of votes from other 3rd party Web sites (incoming links)

View more info about Web site design that’s search engine friendly. Good luck!

Try this: Grab a copy of your local white pages (no, not the online version, a paper-and-ink copy!). Find a phone number for ‘J. Smith’. How long did that take? 10-20 seconds maybe? Not very long. Now choose a phone number at random that is likely to be in the phone book, say 321-1234. Using the phone book, find the person who has that phone number. Go on, I’ll wait. How long did that take? What was that? You haven’t found it yet?

Why is it that finding the number for J. Smith in the phone book is faster (much, much faster!) than finding the person in the phone book who has the number 321-1234? Because the phone book entries have been sorted by name. Because the names in the phone book are sorted, if we are looking for Smith, and we open the phone book at, say, Miller, then we know immediately that we needn’t look in the first half of the phone book. We can quickly eliminate large chunks of the phone book from our search. In contrast, when searching for 321-1234, we have no option but to look at every number on every page until we find it (or get to the end and find the number’s not even in there!). Sorting information is critical to be able to find what we want quickly.

Enter the World Wide Web: a large mass of completely unsorted information. How do we find what we want? We need someone to sort it for us. Fortunately NZS.com is working on this never-ending task for web sites relevant to New Zealand, and looking for what you want on the NZS.com site is fast and efficient.

To find out more about some methods computers use to sort lots of information, see the fascinating site Computer Science Unplugged, two authors of which are prominent New Zealand Computer Scientists.