Referencing Hypertextual

‘right : writing a blog is cool. But there are some rumours around that writing a blog that some people end up reading is kinda cooler.

So tired with having an average of 8 views per blog post I’ve decided to roll up my sleeves and dig into the subject. Believe it or not a few people decided to study the issue before me. Honest.

So here I come, SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

So if like me you want to improve your internet visibility, you wanna be crawled upon all day long, this is the place to start with : lorelle. In particular this very thorough DIY post. Lorelle has been around on the blogosphere for quite a while now and she and her friends has all the tips you need to improve as a blogger and to enhance your electronic visibility.

As far as Hypertextual is concerned, just doing the following has had spectacular effect on my googleity :

• Putting meaningful title : I used to have very funky and witty (or at least I thought they were) titles to my first posts. These were using long sentences and newly created words. Unfoundable. This time is now over.
• Put a title to all the links I put in the posts
• Put titles to all the images
• Put subtitles as header 1
• Add many specific tags. The problem I had was that they would all appear in the wordpress categories box. So I wrote the category widget as text with limited categories and added as many tags as I wanted
• Add technorati tags (well I’m not to sure about this efficiency of this one)

I also tried to do a google map but then you have to give Google a URL where to download it from and it has to be relative to your blog : needless to say that with wordpress.com this is just a no-go.

Anyway thanks to this minor changes I had the following tremendous Google results :

• 1st page on “Alexander Bard“
• 1st place, 1st page on “au revoir simone Coppola“
• 1st page “Tania de Montaigne tokyo c’est loin” (author and book name)
• 1st page on “Internet moves” okay that’s kind of a weird one
• 1st page 8th rank on Images for “keith haring” -> this one is the most amazing
• 1st page, 1st rank on Images “Asobi Seksu“, come on Mr Bezos, bring on the 6 figures salary contract

Okay you also have to talk about edgy and non really mainstream people eventhough one could argue Keith Haring kind of is nowadays.

Cool thing with this is that I just became completely compulsive about it : I spend the whole day PF5ing (which means refreshing the page in the PC land for you Apple-ers) the stats page of my blog, hysterically checking Heavy Mental sociometry.

And here it is for the last 30 days : just the trend, though (looking like our Carbone Dioxide Emission time chart in the Al Gore movie), not the real figures which still are depressing :

Nothing to get over excited about, though : I still have a PageRank = 0.

How about you ? How do you check/control/improve your sociometry ? Are you also hysterical about it or do you just dont give a <keyword> ?

All this while listening to