taking the plunge
Google encourages it’s employees to work on personal projects one day a week on company time. I found this quite interesting. While the company I work for doesn’t encourage this, I figured what the hell. Time to jump into this Blog thing and say something… Anything… But mostly to talk about my search engine optimization adventures.
I’ve quite accidentally developed one of the most popular and top-ranked Windows XP Themes sites on the Internet. In less than three months, between January and March 2001, Belchfire.net went from obscurity (just a personal website with some bookmarks and CGIs for troubleshooting DNS issues) to the top 10 on Google for the search terms ‘xp themes’. Since then, the site has ranked consistently in the top 10 on every major seach engine, and I’ve made a number of changes to the site to further increase placement and ranking.
I’ve become completely fascinated with search engine optimization and what it really takes to get high rankings on the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Inktomi and the like. So this web site will be my outlet to publish what I have done, how I did it, what worked, what didn’t work, and anything new or interesting I find in this whole SEO topic. Plus some of the tips and tricks I’ve picked up along the way regarding managing a webserver. Newbie webmasters take note!
I have to admit that I would never have started this Blog had it not been for a number or articles I’d read here and there that discuss how Blogging can increase one’s pagerank on Google. So this will partly be a test to confirm or dispel the effectiveness of blogging and pagerank. So, here we go. Stay tuned.