Ranking

Ranking in this context means Alexa ranking. This blog I am surprised to say is ranked just over 4 million. I think that's not bad since very little SEO stuff has taken place. And it is so easy to add content to this blog as the HTML side works so well, such as uploading photographs. It is just delightfully easy. The ease encourages me to write something as I don't get bogged down with HTML stuff and formatting stuff.

Another thing about the Google Blogger that I love is the labels. You don't need a navbar as you just tag the article with a name that describes it and Google lists the labels in the left margin. It makes a navbar for you as you go along. Neat.

The biggest difficulty in building a visited website is creating enough good content. That takes time and making it easy to type an article is a great plus.

Pictures of Cats is doing OK but stalling as MS have gone a bit silly and totally wiped me of the face of the internet. I am totally unlisted by MSN but fortunately Yahoo and Google as still listing me so I still get found only my hits have fallen due to no MSN searches.

I emailed MSN and they "kind of" admitted that there was a problem and asked me to re-submit the site and they said wait 2 weeks or so and I should be listed again. I really don't think that this is my website that is wrong but the way that the searech engines change the algorithms. I don't blame them they as are always trying to improve the way the search works but for website builders it means that the goal posts are being moved.

The overriding point though is that the search engines want to find the best content so if you wan to be found make it good. On that basis I am going over some of my pages and upgrading them and see what happens.

Ranking to POC website POC American Curl

Search Engines and Images

I personally love Google. Whatever they produce it is always good to excellent. It works. It makes things easier. And it's free. You just couldn't get better. Thanks Google.

Google does however have a large impact on small website builders such as myself. You have to get high up on search results to be seen and therefore visited. The search engines can be a bit fickle and their algorithms (complicated mathematical formulae to find the best page on a search term - keyword) change. It's a slippery business and an exhausting business. And a constant battle. To all budding website builders: don't start unless you have commitment and stamina as you won't get seen and then what is the point.

Enough griping. The point is this for me. I use photographs a lot; the fine photographs of Helmi Flick.

Her photographs provide a lot of information. They are both highly aesthetic and educational at the same time. But if you put a single large format picture on a page and almost nothing else, the search engines don't like it.

The page in question may provide more information than hundreds of words of description, yet for the search engines the picture is not good enough. They will de-list you (drop the page from their rankings) and maybe worse. There little spiders may tell the search engine that this site is no good because there are too many pages with too few words on them - bad website....

There is still a long way to go before the search engines get it really right and we will look back at this time as a rather crude episode in the history of the internet, one day.

The search engines should give more credence to excellent photographs and pictures but they can't because they have no way of telling which ones are good and probably never will. That's why I have pictures with words on my site most of the time.

If the pictures are alone on the page I normally have it off site.