Rosalind - 12:51 pm on Sep 29, 2004 (gmt 0)

"Most webmasters don't have a commercial interest. They do it for fun and to help other people, not for money." This is the one of the most infantile and silly posts I've ever seen. Webmasters get into sites because it IS fun. And challenging. But the truth is, to develop a superior info site, one that, ultimately reaches many people and serves a ton of useful information------YOU HAVE TO BE SEEN IN SERPS. And that involves hard work aka seo. There's nothing wrong with it.

Bluepixel is right, most webmasters don't do it for money. The ones that you find at the top of the SERPS are a tiny fraction of the whole and do not represent typical webmasters at all. I imagine that those in charge of .edu and .gov domains will be less concerned with search engines, and many amateurs and hobbyists won't care either. Print, newletters, word of mouth, and radio are all ways to let people know about a website and they can work very well. At WebmasterWorld we tend to forget that you can get information at other places than the screen. I'm not just thinking of the blog that someone writes and tells all their friends about, but also the school website that gets mentioned in a newsletter, or the hobby site that is announced at a club meeting, for example.