Media-cow.com

So I submitted my first plugin to pMachine’s ExpressionEngine plugins list.  It’s the JS Calendar for the frontend- a really simple plugin.  Why I hadn’t submitted any before now is a post in itself.  Why I’m rounding up a few to submit now- well, if you’re guessing it’s part of my not so secret SEO plans, you’d be right.

Should have submitted a long time ago- because I learned a few things in the process.  Stupid, simple things I probably should have already known.  But I didn’t- and now I do.  So figured I’d share them.  If you’re not a code monkey, skip this one.  If you are, it’s worth a quick read.

So I crank back in front of the computer after pigging out at the Thanksgiving table, and I’m just sort of enjoying the fact this site is coming together.  It no longer looks like ass, I’ve successfully moved it over to pMachine hosting, I’ve started getting up some nice new downloads and added a few useful sections to the site, site membership keeps climbing and I’m finally giving ya’ll something to look at.  Joy!

And then I notice it, lurking on my toolbar.  Taunting me with its lack of green goodness.  My page rank- or lack thereof.  Yes, indeedy, I have PageRank of 0.  That’s 0 as in ‘ZERO’.  Jeesh, I haven’t had a site with 0 PageRank since I knew what it was!  To make things worse- looks like all of my pages aside from the index are banished to Google’s ‘Supplemental results’- i.e., the kiss of death.

What to do, what to do?  Get to work fixing it- and document the process in a series of posts.  This?  Would be the first.

Want to know about what to do- and what NOT to do- in order to make an ExpressionEngine powered site search engine friendly?  Read on.  In this entry, I’ll try and track down the problem areas so I can start to fix them.  Where to start?  Google, Yahoo and sitemaps.

It’s way past time for an update, but I’ve been swamped.  So I thought to myself ‘What would be a good, informal way to keep folks updated on what’s up with me and the site?’  Gee- a blog, perhaps?  So- now there’s a blog.  Which I’m mostly using to announce that there’s a blog.  And now a forum- because I needed a place to talk about the EEz Amazon module, which I’m not quite ready to put in the regular download area yet.  Also- the rss feeds are actually functional now- with forum feeds to boot.  Oh- and I went ahead and fired up Yoshi’s linklist module, which I’ve had installed forever.

Want to read more?  It’s just ramblings, but that’s what I figure blogs are good for….