CHESSNOID

When I first started blogging, I just wanted to feed my creative side and contribute to my community in my own special way. I wrote about Seattle, which is a city I fell in love with, and one day hope to become a resident of. I rambled on about things I enjoy such as drinking coffee, watching movies, looking for deals on Ebay, amazon, and many online stores, reading blogs, talking about boxing and mma, snoopy stuff, my education and Seinfeld, stocks, investments and housing. Like I said, I rambled. It was and still very enjoyable for me.

And as I progressed, I wanted to make sure I was actually reaching people who might actually enjoy reading my stuff. I figured I would just rely on google. You know someone would type in the word Chess or Noid, preferably together and viola, here you are. Obviously, I was my biggest fan and of course no one googled my site except for me. DOH!! I did the email to friends and family inviting them to visit my site. And I think a few of them came in and gave me a courtesy cameo appearance. They probably thought, ‘just as I suspected, very boring just like in real life. He thinks chess is a sport?!’

So after about a month of blogging, my wife emailed me a site to help possibly increase traffic. I signed up and they never approved me. grrrrr… Forget them! They won’t even get a shameless plug until they approve me. However, that lead me to another site MyBlogLog that I have plugged here a million times. They were nice enough to feature my community which has a membership of over 100 people now. It was an excellent community that linked me up to other similar blog communities: BlogCatalog, WeBetUr, Romlet and Bumpzee. MBL helped me meet many other bloggers who helped me and wrote their own great blogs. Some of them are experts in this whole internet thing and others just being generous and giving back by teaching what they have learned to newbies like me. Their links are on my blogroll to show my appreciation, as well as my admiration. One thing I want to say about Romlet that I like that the other avatar graphs don’t show are people who come visit that aren’t registered members of those other sites. I notice these anonymous visitors’ favicons show there. This is hard to explain, but if you move your cursor over the Romlets and hover over the supporters it will make more sense.

Blogging Mix helped me increase my Technorati ranking. I am up to 17 as of today. I don’t really understand the algorithm it uses, but basically to increase you must do a few things. I did the easiest things he recommended. Making comments on other blogs helps a little bit. So if you are looking to get some increase this way, feel free to comment here anytime. Just be sure you put your website with your name to make it work and link back to your site. The second thing I tried was a viral tag. I posted it on my site a few days ago and you can see, it seems to have worked because my technorati rank has almost doubled from when I started. I even put in my site in the “what is my site worth” widget. It said $0 a few days ago and now it says it is worth $9597.18. What does this mean? I really don’t know. Can someone tell me where the technorati bank atm is located?? I would like to withdraw this before they take it back. lol. Check out the cluster map of where my site visitors are coming from.

Because I read alot of blogs, I run into a lot of terms by more well versed bloggers. The most recent article I read was by Bryan at One Mans Goal site. He explains what permalinks are which is how you can increase your Search Engine Optimization SEO. This is how people find you when they google or yahoo your site. So this will be my first post where I will attempt to put a permalink. The permalink is that string of characters behind your web address. Mine usually just says page??. This makes sense when people type in a search and your permalink is meaningless, that it will be at the bottom of the search results. Hopefully that made sense, but if it didn’t and you want to learn more, just read his post that I have linked here Building Search Engine Friendly Permalinks.

On a different topic, President Bush and the Federal Reserve’s chairman Bernanke commented on the housing market basically saying don’t worry, we have your back. Whether this is true or not, like the weapons of mass destruction, it did help ease investors’ worries and the buyers beat out the sellers today. Thank goodness for some positive news for a change.