pro tip #1: meta description and meta keywords April 27, 2009

Okay, let’s turn this challenge up a notch. An important thing that contributes to your Google PageRank is a good description that’s representative of your blog’s focus, and good, representative keywords as well. Only one of you has meta keywords and they’re garbage that look they’re coming from the blog’s chosen theme.

Dig into your blog software’s options to figure out how to set a description and keywords. Then verify by pulling up the page source of your blog’s main page. You should see your description and keywords tagged like this in the page header:

Your keywords should be all the words and phrases you think your blog’s target audience might search on. Your description is the text that Google will show on a page of search results under the link to your blog, but it also contributes to your PageRank.

Week Three Update: We Have A Front Runner! April 26, 2009

Three weeks into it and we have a front runner. Guess Who’s Dead emerges from the pack with a PageRank of 0.

Site	Current Pagerank
Guess Who’s Dead	0
A Dollar Past Sunset	unranked
Blawgblawgblawg’s Blog	unranked
Caveat Robert	unranked
Dancing Videos Blog	unranked
Mute’s Observations	unranked
G:L:O:B – Blog about anything	unranked
ObituQueries	unranked

Alexa rankings April 23, 2009

Larry has received a request for Alexa rankings. (Here’s a good article.) Whereas PageRank is Google scoring a site’s relevance, Alexa rankings are Alexa’s scoring of a site’s reach (number of unique users) and traffic. And those are certainly significant and meaningful criteria. But the method Alexa uses to accrue their data is quite dubious, Larry thinks. Alexa rankings are based on a small, self-selected and geographically skewed sample of internet users who’ve all installed the Alexa toolbar. Larry thinks the only thing Alexa rankings are good for is rough comparative intelligence when you don’t have access to accurate traffic data.

If an advertiser is looking to do a direct ad buy from a website, and wants to know what they’re getting for their money, the site owner can provide accurate traffic data. So you don’t see actual monetary transactions informed by Alexa rankings, not the way Google PageRank or actual traffic data gets used to inform ad pricing.

Larry toyed with the idea of having challenge participants configure their sites for tracking actual traffic via Google Analytics, but decided to save that maybe as the basis for a future challenge.

Still, it doesn’t hurt to roll up the Alexa rankings, just for fun:

Site	Alexa ranking
Caveat Robert	8
Dancing Videos Blog	5,102,695
Guess Who’s Dead	5,330,500
G:L:O:B – Blog about anything	8,733,486
Blawgblawgblawg’s Blog	10,140,841
A Dollar Past Sunset	10,444,541
Mute’s Observations	13,531,075
ObituQueries	13,531,221

And if those results aren’t dubious, I don’t know what is. (Yes, low numbers are good.)

So to reiterate, the challenge winner is determined exclusively by Google PageRank.

Week Two Update April 19, 2009

Friday the 17th was the end of week two. We have an additional participant who tapped in to the challenge concurrent with me posting the week one rankings on the 10th. But we have no PageRank movement by anyone as of yet:

Site	Current Pagerank
A Dollar Past Sunset	unranked
Blawgblawgblawg’s Blog	unranked
Caveat Robert	unranked
Dancing Videos Blog	unranked
G:L:O:B – Blog about anything	unranked
Guess Who’s Dead	unranked
Mute’s Observations	unranked
ObituQueries	unranked

Week One Update April 10, 2009

One week into it we have seven blogs who’ve taken up the gauntlet, and some pretty fun content, but no front runners as of yet:

Site	Current Pagerank
A Dollar Past Sunset	unranked
Blawgblawgblawg’s Blog	unranked
Dancing Videos Blog	unranked
G:L:O:B – Blog about anything	unranked
Guess Who’s Dead	unranked
Mute’s Observations	unranked
ObituQueries	unranked