Optimising I.T. sites

[rupalis]

Hello all

I am optimising a website the focus of which is IT education. Google and MSN ignore the word "IT" in any form when presenting search results. I have tried searching for "it", "i.t.", "I.T.", "IT"

The results for "IT Training" and "Training" are different but there is no mention of "IT" in the first.

The paid ads change appropriately for each of the searches.

Does anyone have experience in optimising IT sites? What is the alternate for "IT" in organic search?

Thanks for your help
Rupali

[Marcia]

What you're running into is that "it" is probably a stop word - meaning very common and not counted, like "the" and "an."

When you think about it, people looking for education may not even be familiar with the abbrevated way of referring to it, and may look for education for information technology - or any of its various narrower components.

Your job in optimizing is not to optimize for what you yourself call something, but to optimize for what your target audience might call it, and the keywords and phrases that audience would use at a search engine to find the site.

[rupalis]

Hi Marcia, thanks a lot for your feedback. I understand how the site should be optimised from a user point of view. But I am a potential buyer for this product too and if I searched on "IT training" I would never find this website. Funnily enough wordtracker shows a count of 508 for "it training", so I wonder where all this traffic is going to?

I will try with "Information Technology" instead of "IT" and see how I go. But if you find any examples of better use of keywords for this kind of website please do let me know.

Thanks again.
Regards
Rupali

[Marcia]

Rupali, generally when I want to research a topic like this one I'll start at ODP and see how the section is structured. Then I'll look for information at some of the better sites that are listed there. That way, we can know that the sites are on topic and relevant to the subject matter. because they were reviewed by editors to ensure that they qualify within the topic area.

In this respect, directories are more valuable for research than search engines - simply because of the human element doing screening out so that we're left with what's informational and useful.

You can also research at related vertical directories and IT forums as well as noted information sites such as SitePoint and some of the related Jupiter properties, to see what the common terminology and related vocabulary is.