seo seo seo!

You know it started as a sort of rebellious prank. My dastardly plan, to knock www.corz.com (the decorative paper company) off the top spot of all the search engines. I've nothing against them, as such, it's just that they're above me in the results of all the search engines, along with sometimes thousands of other "corz", and that's irritating. Yes, I know I've only had the org for a wee while, but that's not the point, I have plans.

I considered professional help and so googled for "seo" figuring that the top three must be the best in the business, after all, they got to the top three of google when I searched for seo, right?

But There's more to life than google, and my recent meanderings into search engine optimisation have opened my eyes to a whole new world of spiders, robots, directories and so many other information-hunting entities, all packed to the gunnels with eager sites looking to do exactly the same thing as corz.org; get to the top of the results.

As ever, I reckoned, 'if they can do it, I can do it', and so did a little light reading. Now, although companies spend extraordinary amounts of money on seo, there is, in fact, nothing particularly difficult or incomprehensible about the whole subject, and any trainee executive with a web browser and a nice bonus would probably be quite capable of achieving results very similar to the "big boys".

Essentially, by following a few simple rules any old joe bloggs could get his site ranked, I reckoned. So I started to tweak these pages some. My first round of tweaks focus on getting my site to the top of the results when someone searches for the phrase "corz mac". This isn't a phrase I expect many folks would search for, and in fairness, There's not a lot of competition for this key phrase. All it takes is a wee bit of seo, and some time..

They say it takes six to eight weeks to get a decent ranking on the major search engines, and although I generally consider myself a patient human being, I do think that a couple of weeks ought to be quite enough time for them to catch on to my new and improved search-engine-friendly pages, and so decided it was time for a wee browse around..

I started here, hahah! a good start! from the zillions of web sites in the world, the word "corz" returns just two results. TWO! I guess it's "exclusive". But who is numero uno? I just know I should stop now, bask in it for a while, but how can I? I must know!

www.buzzle.com is an interesting engine. when searching on other search engines, you will often see hits for buzzle's results pages, why search engines cache and index these is beyond me, but apparently I'm right up there if you search for something like "Basketball and the Human consciousness" or "Horses and the human experience" and similar bizarre phrases, words that appears NOWHERE in this site, I guarantee it! well, at least not Basketball, well, at least not until I typed it just now. damn!

Strangely, when you actually visit buzzle and search for these same queries (by following the links from other engine's results), all you get is Beyonce Knowles. Buzzle's alright, though..

buzzle rocks! ... where's corz.com now? huh? huh? ... Aw.. here they are..

okay, they still top yahoo, but look who's at position three eh! right behind ya! and four! erm, AND six.. that's not right. Anyway, I'm supposed to be targeting for the phrase "corz mac", so back to business..

check it out! ahh.. in moz we trust. mind you, in the ever-changing world of search engines, and search engine algorhythmics, that link may lead you to completely and utterly corz.org unrelated content, but when I clicked it, I was right there at the top. no, honest! What about hotbot? In the old days, before google, hotbot was the only search engine I used. not what it used to be, though.

To cut a potentially very long story short, it turns out that on eight of the top ten search engines, corz.org is on page one. And that's in just over a week, and with only a £3.99 budget.

I'll be watching these statistics closely over the coming weeks and months. well, not me, as such, no need; there are plenty of online tools and services that will do this sort of thing for you. like this.

So much for six to eight weeks. perhaps that's just for google who, by dint of being the market leader-and-all, are allowed to take their time. I know; whenever their robots are round it takes me an age to clean up after. they lounge about, smoking and playing with the script source viewer, just "hanging". laid-back you might say, lacking the hunger of the young bots, keen to strike a fresh hit in advance of the search behemoth.

we all accept the googlebot,
wine, and dine, and wait.

some more aggressively than others

I realise that at the end of this I will probably be left with little more than a weird variety of seo numbness, and in time, all that will remain is an awareness of search engines, which, when you get right down to it, is really all you need to get an effective ranking, that and a bit of common sense. oh, and maybe a few choice tools..

Aye, I was just about to slash my wrists last night on finding this tool, in so many ways superior to my humble pda, when I got this email from Jimbu in Canada..

COR! (who oh why do people insist on capitalising me! -ed)

THANK YOU!

pda rocks! I saw your tool on webmaster-**** and "gave it a whirl" heheh. EXCELLENT! this is *just* what I was looking for. I can run it at home!

THANK YOU!

-Jimbu

Jimbu, I know where you live, cut it with the capitals okay! And please, stop telling people you've seen my tool! ;o)

appreciated. having online tools is neat, yes, but for intensive use, you need the things running at home. show us your source people! save me the time involved in making pda whip yer scrawny butts!

Taking of scrawny butts, I seem to be getting an increased number of hits from Japan these days, mostly due to this site, which has slowly started adding all my wee bits and bobs, good work dudes! It'll be good to be able to tell the girl in the local shop that "I'm big in Japan", giving me an opportunity for heavy emphasis on the word "big", as is my wont, and the real reason I started buying the giant Rizlas, a company which really needs to pay more attention to its inbound email. sheesh.

And lastly, in case you hadn't spotted, I got the corzoogle release out. download it and drop it in your personal webserver or website. have fun! If you need assistance, don't forget There's also a host of keyword-packed web pages to go with it!

for now..

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org