The Aspiring Crackpot

I’ve just been denied my first link exchange. I found someone I really respected, created a banner for him, exactly like those on his site, and wrote a nice, personal letter asking if he’d be willing to trade me links. No marketing-speak (I wouldn’t do that to someone anyway), only me asking.

Nope, no dice. Turns out he doesn’t do link exchanges. I can appreciate that, at least he wrote me back at all. It was a little disheartening for the first thing of the morning. Immediately afterward, I called our usual breakfast house to order a coffee and toast.

Nope, no dice, again! Turns out they’re too busy for delivery today.

Well, as it turns out, I refuse to take that as a defeat. In Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill writes that failures are merely stepping stones to victory. Check out my post Success, Guaranteed! for a little boost of self-discipline, because that’s what it takes. Now I intend to ask for twice as many link exchanges. The first one to turn me down was only a step toward the first to accept me! Hell, if anyone’s reading this, I’ll trade you a link today, just because I’m in the mood to overcome

I also just made my own coffee, so that minor with the coffee shop simply allowed me to save money and overcome my laziness. Let’s get this morning rolling!

This site isn’t a private affair. I’m doing this in hopes that my crazy schemes of becoming a better person will help someone, and that this can in turn provide a little support for my time. In any case, one of the aspects of the creation of the Aspiring Crackpot is that it’s a wonderful opportunity for me to teach myself SEO, or, if you’ve been living under a rock, Search Engine Optimization. Now, I’m going to focus on “white-hat”, or benign optimizations (although I know there’s contention as to what this actually means.) In case you’re thinking of setting up something similar, here is a list of exactly what I’ve done. Let me say first that none of these are my original ideas, I’ve only done what I’ve been able to glean from reading online.

The first thing was to optimize Wordpress. Wordpress is awesome in that it works similar to many CMSs, or Content Management Systems. When you write a post, it’s saved as a database entry, and when someone navigates to your page, the php script calls that entry, using the CSS as a filter to display the content, just as if you’d programmed the page by hand. It’s simple for the user, and provides the freedom of simple writing and publishing to many people who aren’t tech-savvy enough to program a site on their own. Unfortunately there are a few drawbacks to this system, the most important being that by default, it’s not very search engine friendly.

The first step is to fix up your links. Because CMS systems use backend server-speak to interface with the database, records (ie. your posts) are called from the database by their unique identifier number, like this: http://www.duanemathes.com/?p=123

Obviously the p=123 is your 123rd post, but what does that mean to a search engine robot crawling and indexing by keyword? In this example, think of a robot as the village idiot. The village idiot wants to know where he can eat, drink, and be merry, and will be happy to bring all his friends, but would he remember the street address of “The Salty Seaman” after a night on the slosh? Doubtful. He’d remember the wench with the biggest — well, keywords.

Similarly, the robot won’t even read your site if you don’t have friendly links (ie. big jugs.) Fortunately for us, Wordpress has an easy fix.

1. Navigate to Options / Permalinks.

2. Choose custom, and enter: /%category%/%postname%/

(If your .htaccess file isn’t writeable, Wordpress will give you a snippet of code to paste into it.)

3. Save, and mouse over one of your links. You’ll see that they are much more readable, not only to you, but to any village idiot that happens to wander by.

Another thing I’ve done to build links is set up BlogRush, a link sharing system for bloggers. Tomorrow I’ll get into why this is great for increasing your visibility, but for now, click here to learn more.