How many keyword searches begin with  “Why” questions? How many searches that begin with the question “Why?” get a single result that completely answers the question? Let’s take a gander through a “Why?” question process using search. Our question: Why is there war? A very broad question, and before I put the magic words “war” into various search engines, I will bore the reader with a little game I like to play when doing searches. The “What am I going to get game?”

Search engines generally provide the most recent content first, probably news, or commentary on a war somewhere in the world. Search engines also reward its users with popular content meaning other users have visited particular sites and spent time on those sites or pages. Popular sites should be high in the ranks too. Wikipedia should definitely be there right near the top. What about war museum web sites? They probably have good quality incoming links. But generally, museum sites have technical or content issues that slow them down and make it tough for search engines to index the site to a level appropriate to the quality of their informational assets.

Okay, time for that magical moment…type, click and we have

#1: Wikipedia – on real war.
#1: A Wikipedia on the music band War.
#2: 10 day free offer for the WarHammer on-line war game
#3:  A movie titled “War”. (Interesting it is here, not a recent movie)

#4: Web site for the band War (a blast from the past, I loved that band when I was a kid.)

#5: Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning (the game again)
#6: War Made Éasy – a video on video google
#7: The famous book by Carl von Clausewitz On War written in 1832 showing up on Google Books
#8: BBS-History-World Wars
#9: “Grocery Store Wars” a video on YouTube.

No museums in the first 10 results. The second page of the search has a very good link from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. If you happen to be interested, it’s a good piece, here’s the link.

http://www.illc.uva.nl/~seop/entries/war/

This article does answer the question “why is there war” from the perspective of the author.

Lessons learned:
1. “big” terms are SEO competitive due to extensive usage by various industries. Energy will be required make a dent at this level.
2. Searchers interested in war (the real market) are probably not going to use this search more than once, they will use phrases.
3. This type of keyword probably has peaky traffic, when a war starts, searches peak, then it dies down. Not a good keyword for repeat traffic. I found my answer from Wikipedia and Stanford, so I probably won’t use this keyword again for a long time or ever.
4. Searchers coming from the question perspective “why” are probably a tough group to anticipate in terms of their search behavior. Question types What, Where, Who and When are much easier inquiry paths to anticipate.
5. More an implication than a lesson, search patterns are not linear, they are chaotic movements downward. Very much like the kids game where you put a ball on the top piece of downward tilted wood and it rolls down and drops to the next piece of wood, etc. Much easier to catch them lower in the game.

The keyword “war” represents an all-star keyword because it has a collection of top search results from different sources, ie. general information, gaming company, books/publishing, video/broadcasting. Like the make up of the NFL all-star game, best players brought together from different teams. Each “player” is in the top search results for their own reasons.