Africa's OSS/Linux All Blogs

I was nicely surprised to see increase in traffic this year to my online portfolio. After examining web stats the top search engine was Bing and not Google. I have been fan of Google for a long time but their search engine is far from perfect. Listing of pages is chaotic and does not seems to follow logical rules. The rise in traffic from Bing means users are defecting Google search. Playing field is slowly becoming even. One dominant search engine creates online monopoly and kills business opportunities. "Evil Empire" started to having positive influence on Internet search. The ideal situation would be to have mainstream search engines equal market share. Exiting times ahead !

Finally broadband prices have fallen by half. Previously you paid R60 per one Gig of data. Now you can pay R29 per Gig. This offer is from AfriHost and I have been using their account for the past 2 months with good result. Next year we can expect further price drop as more undersea cables come online in Africa.

The cost of bandwidth in South Africa is sky high. Despite SEACOM cable and others prices have not dropped a single rand. This country has history of monopolies where you pay premium price for substandard service. Well this is Africa and it's miracle that you get Internet connectivity at all. Things are unlikely to change but after 2010 all that extra infrastructure should bring prices down.

What is SEO ? It stands for Search Engine Optimization
Is it worth the trouble ? Definitively yes, properly optimized pages for key keywords will bring organic traffic which is free
How do I start ? Firstly find out which keywords are popular here
Secondly read this article to see where to place those keywords. Online there is lots of competition so you should target local domain names such as mysite.co.za

We have a couple of SA Search Engines

Jonga looked quited nice but it's "updating core" for couple of months now and is out of action

Funnel is around for some time but suffers from out of date content since inception

search24 looks not too bad

Grabble is quite new but it's non-commercial therefore might not last very long

Google.co.za is my favorite and for most people

FindSA is more of automated directory than search engine

Perhaps we need aggregated search engine that uses all above in one user interface ?