Printers, like pets, become part of the family over time. That’s not necessarily a good thing either. Particularly if that family is dysfunctional and the printer is doing its very best to fit in.
In any other family the printer would most likely have performed its duties dutifully, pushing out page after page of beautifully proportioned and evenly layered ink formations, a symphony of C, M, Y and K all singing in harmony like prize-winning Sweet Adelines.
Instead I would get half a page of horizontally challenged ink stripes. They weren’t even black. It was like the printer elves had come and dragged cold teabags across the page.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
It was the printer’s attitude, which ultimately led to its demise.
Now I love a joke as much as the next dysfunctional computer user but my printer’s poor attitude was wearing me down to the point of no return. It was going to be me or the printer. It was time for some tough love.
I sat down and had a serial port to port on what it really means to be a part of a dysfunctional family. No more sticking out a ribbon tongue while you sit there defiantly refusing to print that vital manuscript, talk or work assignment, two minutes before we have to shoot out the door. And an end to hanging on to that piece of paper like you were a 3 year old throwing a tantrum and refusing to let go of his Thomas the tank engine.
I plugged it in, waiting for a repentant response. The beige child with the parallel port had suddenly become the rebellious teenager and gave me a salute, a salute which was an indication of both its stupidity and defiance all rolled into one.
It now lives under the bed in the spare room, grounded and gathering dust. I guess you can’t teach an old printer new manners.
Outdoor Shower SEO Update!
If you have no interest in anything related to search engine optimisation then you’ll probably want to throw yourself off the bus here – it could get pretty boring. Sorry, it’s just what I do. Anyway in my last post I mentioned the strange issue of attracting traffic for a keyword I don’t have a lot of content for – outdoor shower. Interestingly, since that post 11 days ago, that keyword has made up over 6% of my search engine traffic, which is significant considering I don’t have a lot of helpful information about outdoor showers on my site, nor is my site thematically related to showers in any way (unless we’re talking metaphorically about showering websites with Google Love, yep a tenuous link I know).
As far as actually ranking for the keyword “outdoor shower” this website is sitting somewhere on the third page of results, which is more realistic considering what my site is about but even still I am getting Google search engine traffic from it.
So what are some takeaway points from all this?
- Even minimal SEO can give your site a boost in both ranking and referral traffic for any given keyword phrase you want to target.
- While page 1 (top ten) of Google is the goal for your main keywords, don’t write off lower results as having no value.
- Fresh, regularly updated content gets Google Love, hence why a blog is a great way to draw traffic and rank for new and obscure keywords, even if it’s for no reason except that you can!
- Different search engines can vary wildly in how you are ranked – while I might be 22 in Google for “outdoor shower”, I’m hardly registering on Bing and Yahoo (over 100). For me, I focus on Google because they have about 70% of the market share and that makes them worth chasing.
- While things like headings, tags, image descriptions and internal linking have minimal SEO benefit, combined they can make a significant contribution to how your site is ranked.