TheRightPic.com

Been a while since I wrote anything. I have been busy with taking photos and posting them and other things, like working to pay the bills.

Recently I have began the process of looking for people to actually come to the site and to start to use the photos and read the blog posts. I have found out that there is this other world that exists that involves page rank and something called Alexa, and another thing called SEO.

Here is a small slice of what I have gathered into my brain as of today:

Alexa rankings mean nothing, or should mean nothing. If you have created a website and are wondering about how it ranks on the world wide web don’t assume that any number you get from Alexa rankings gives you an indication. (Check out alexa.com)

Currently this site is listed at #699,610 on the Alexa rankings. We have moved up 8,300,000 spots in about 3 weeks. How many visitors have we had? Not enough to justify that kind of increase. Even if I take into account that Alexa needed some time to calibrate our position I can’t justify that my site is that popular.

Alexa ranks sites based on how many people visit them that have an Alexa toolbar installed, from what I gather. That means that since most people have never heard of Alexa and certainly don’t have the toolbar that the rankings are pretty skewed.

Ok, enough about Alexa. A much different beast is Google Page Rank. As of today this site has none. That is bad. To find our more about page rank, Google it. You can also see the page rank of any site you visit by installing the Google toolbar.

Page Rank is determined by a combination of witchcraft and mathematics and weather patterns in Southern Mongolia, apparently, and is all important in determining where your website stands in the Google search index. That may not be the right way to write that or technically accurate but basically assume that if you have high Page Rank you are doing things right according to Google and other sites are more interested in linking to you, directories want to post your links, and advertisers want to do business with you because people are coming to your site.

How do you achieve high Page Rank? Well, I have visited several forums lately looking for wisdom on this matter and have heard many things. One thing that seems to be clear is that you want to have higher ranking sites linking to you. In other words, if a photo site has a link to www.therightpic.com it is like I just earned a point towards my Google rankings. This ranking also has something to do with the relevance of the site that is linking to you.

For example: If I have links from a manufacturing site to my site, even if they are very popular, it won’t mean as much because I have no manufacturing related content. How does Google accomplish such things? I guess it is smoke and mirrors and rabbits pulled out of hats by the Google crawler things that float around and decide whether your site has worth or not.

So, the reverse of all of this good page rank karma is also true. If you get a point for every good site that links to you, you get a point deducted for every link you make outbound to sites that are lower than you in page rank. You get a point deducted if you link to sites that are ‘bad’, meaning that they have no content or who have done something to offend the Google deities. So, just like with french kissing, you want to be careful who you share links with. Try to share links with sites that are better and more popular than yours, even though they won’t want to share links with you…

The magical factor in all of this is, of course, content. If you actually have cool content and your site looks good you can get people to link to you because you are cool.

On a sad personal note, I was always picked last when it came time to make teams when I was a kid and I am afraid that with website stuff I am also on the getting shafted side, but who knows? I just got started, it could turn around. Gulp.

Recriprocal links are also not as good as they once were. It used to be that you could exchange links and get good Google ranking. Google didn’t like that. They want people to serve as indentured servants before they give them a page rank. There are no shortcuts to the front of the line. So, now you can think of reciprocal links as cancelling each other out in many cases.

Regarding this and with everything I am saying there is an exception, and it is if you can exchange links with a higher ranking site. Their good rank might just outweigh your crappy rank and give you some points towards page rank. I think. So far my efforts haven’t reaped much.

Although, I haven’t actually tested whether this reciprocal linking stuff really is bad. I do use linkalizer.com, which is a free link exchange service and have no idea whether that is hurting or helping my page rankings.

I do know that one or two of the sites I have exchanged links with have actually sent me real visitors and that is something I can say is concrete and not some Google whim thing. It really is all about getting people to the site so however I can accomplish that would be good.

I will finish this rant with another aspect of this website establishment stuff that is weird.

DMOZ, which sounds like that bad guy in Ghostbusters, is a human edited directory of websites that is open source and used by Google and a few of the other big search engines for their directory structures.

Getting your site listed with DMOZ has to be good for you, since so many search engines and large sites use it. This would definitely help your page rank and all of the other crud I have talked about. However, getting this listing is difficult. Yes, I will say difficult.

The idea behind DMOZ is awesome, create a directory that is free of bad sites because it only allows sites in that have been reviewed by a human being. You can’t pay to get into it so that is another good thing. The real problem is that since it is edited by humans (that are all volunteers) you may wait a really long time to get your site listed. You may also catch your category editor on a bad day and they will decline your submission. You may have an editor that is lazy or that is your competition.

If any of these things happen you will be kept out of DMOZ.org and out of the large directory source that many search engines are using. That would be bad.

I have read a few articles that suggest you cheat and become an editor yourself for DMOZ.org and then approve your own site but I have not yet tried that and I am not sure my integrity would let me join up just for that. I would have to actually do the work and be an editor and that sounds like another ‘good cause’ that would take a lot of time.

Anyway, I feel better now that I have all of that off of my chest.

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