During the past week, I learned five new things about the blog world and ElvisBlog’s participation in it. Four of the things were good, and the fifth was funny.
The year-end numbers for 2008 are in, and ElvisBlog had a great year. Total hits jumped to 154,000, up from 88,000 in 2007. So, that was obviously one of the good things. Page views were up similarly to 306,000, and some consider that to be the more important measurement.
Also, I recently received an invitation to post ElvisBlog articles on a website called www.collectibles-articles.com. They manage a very thorough Collectibles Articles Directory. They had 1541 articles in 32 categories, but they had only one Elvis story. The decision to boost that led them to me. They are interested in eight or nine of my blog columns that have to do with Elvis goodies. No money, but they say I'll get a nice boost in traffic, because there is a little bio paragraph at the end of every story, with two links to ElvisBlog. I should pick up a bunch of new Elvis fans over time. I have sent in four old columns so far, and they all have been accepted. So, that’s more good.
The initial exploratory e-mail from Mr. Jack Straw at Collectibles-Articles.Com extolled their esteemed PR3 rating from Google. I had no idea what that meant, so I asked. Here is the answer:
“Google's Page Rank system is how they determine what pages are
most important and useful to searchers when they put in search terms.
The ranks go from 0 (lowest) to 10 (only a handful of sites). The
vast majority of sites are skewed at the low end (0 or 1), with
rapidly diminishing numbers of sites as you go up the scale.”
Well, that made me curious, and I e-mailed back and asked if he could look up ElvisBlog’s Google PR number. I was so tickled when he came back with:
“You should be quite proud of a PR4; few niche-focused sites get that high.”
OK, I will be proud. I never suspected ElvisBlog would get a higher number than the one he had been so proud of for his site. So, that was more good.
PR number was not the only thing Mr. Straw extolled. He also noted they were ranked in first place in their category by Google, so I wrote back and asked how he knows that fact. This time, I was a little embarrassed to hear the answer:
“Do a search for Elvis blog or other similar terms and see how Google ranks the sites.”
Duh!! I have done that dozens of times and the answer is still the same every time. If I type Elvis blog in the Google category box, the page that opens up will have ElvisBlog at the top of the list. So, all this time, I could have been saying: “Ranked #1 Elvis blog by Google,” but I was too stupid to know it. Other than the stupid part, this was another good thing.
E-mail brought me something else interesting. A PR lady asked if I would write an article about a party at a restaurant on Elvis’ birthday, January 8, 2009. The restaurant is MAC 24-7 in the Hilton Waikiki. This resulted in the article I posted last week. However, in an e-mail reply from the PR lady, she used a term that confused me. She said, “Great SEO!”
Here we go again. I had to e-mail back and admit my ignorance of that one. She replied:
“SEO means search engine optimization. It’s the process of improving your website traffic from search results. Basically, it means that when you type in “Elvis blog” into a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo, you have the best content, link backs (other people linking back to your site), keywords, etc. that make your blog the topped rank.”
Wow. I was starting to get a big head about all this, but then I learned something else that brought me down a few notches.
My blog software allows me to see what people have been searching for on Google when they linked to ElvisBlog. Most of the search items make sense, like Elvis Jumpsuits, for example. But some of them are pretty weird. I couldn’t imagine why anyone had typed in one very strange search term last week, but ElvisBlog made the first page of results.
So, in the same week that it hit me ElvisBlog has this great #1 site rating, I also found out that my creation is #7 in “Crummy Elvis Shit.”
© 2008 Philip R Arnold, Original Elvis Blogmeister, All Rights Reserved www.ElvisBlog.net
