GoogleFIGHT! “Website” vs “Web Site”
Posted by Gul Khan in Measurement on July 7th, 2008
While I was writing my previous post about the PetrolWatch Customer Satisfaction Survey results, the text editor kept prompting me that the spelling was “web site” and not “website”. My first reaction was to get on to Google Trends or Googlefight and find out how the rest of the world was spelling it. Here’s how it works:
STEP 1: Go to www.google.com/trends and key in “website, web site” into the text box
Step 2: And the winner is…
If you look at the two lines above the time line, you will see more people search for “website” compared with “web site”. End of argument. I’ll just add “website” to my dictionary. On occasion, we do use this technique in our website development work, especially in areas where we need fast customer insights about which is the most appropriate label to use for navigation, page titles, links and so on.
Why is this important?
Well, if you care about your search engine rankings, you do want to make sure that your keywords match the most popular keywords that your customers are using. For those of you who have had experience designing and managing websites, you will know that finding the right label and wording can sometimes be a nightmare task:
- “Should we call it “cheap flights” or “low fares”? (This example was used by Gerry McGovern in one of his web seminars which I had the pleasure of attending)
- “Point and shoot camera” or “point and click camera”?
In the past, we were in the dark about what is the correct label to use. Now we have free tools at our disposal that give us instant insights.
Tags: Google, search behavior |
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