Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2008-12-26 21:38:43 - Graham Ellis
The gap from end-of-training a week before Christmas to start-of-training in the new year is a chance to catch up on some non-urgent, but never the less important things; catching up with family and on the personal side, as a starter (and that's somewhat away from this blog) but also with things like search engine placement.
Those of you who read this after being on a PHP course - or one of our other public courses - may have heard me describe who getting a good web site placement is rather like driving a gigantic oil tanker. You put what feels like a lot of effort in for a very long time, turning what feels like a stupidly silly little propeller and slowly - oh SO slowly - the propeller starts to move the ship forward. And my goodness me - you had better be careful that you're running it in the right direction because turning will take an awful lot of effort later on!
And you do need to keep turning that propeller to - there's a daily "twist" here, and I try to update a handful of other pages most days too. And at times it's worthwhile doing a more radical update. That sometimes needs research, and that's one of these non-urgent issues that I've plugged away at for a few hours today.
If you have a look here you'll see s scruffy page of mixed up links. And if you fill a word into the field on the form there, you'll see a selection of other links. Does it look good? No - it doesn't, but it's not intended to - it's my research, where I'm looking at the relative ranking of our pages; that's something you can now report to the search engines via a sitemap file, and I'm working on algorithms to classify the best part of 10,000 URLs automatically.
This work is ongoing, and it will be so for a while. As a subsidiary effect, it will help me monitor the usage, fade in and fade out of popularity of our pages, but you probably won't see it much, nor hear much more about it. Come to think of it, when you travel on the local bus you're not often aware of where it's fuelled and how it's serviced, and when you stay at our hotel you probably don't think about where the laundry's done ... so you're probably not too concerned at our SEO algorithms - just that you can find what you need here on our web site.