Keeping up with the Cyber-Jones'

Has anyone stopped to think about how much time one takes to sit and write blogs and forum postings each day for the sake of keeping up your site's "freshness/new content"? Unless you're actually PAID to sit down and type endless paragraphs of "stuff", you got to admit that it's kind of a waste of time!

Take this blog for example - I started it to just "speak my mind" without getting flooded with opposition to what I was posting (aka: Markus' Rant & Rave Forums). It's mainly for my entertainment, and hopefully YOU the reader's entertainment. But think of all the time I'm spending typing this stuff into this blog? It could be spent learning a new skill, searching for a job, communicating with friends, doing actual work, etc.

HOWEVER, sites like this won't get even an honorable mention in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and others without constantly refreshing content and lots and lots of "keywords".

Which is funny - keywords are an essential part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which helps get your page higher up on the list of relative matches to people's search terms (aka - those pesky "keywords"). However, just flooding your page with the proper keywords isn't enough. If you're selling "ABC products" but your site's URL is "XYZ.com", the person with "ABC.com" will come up before your site when searched - even if they're not selling ABC products. AND, Google (being the mega-search site on the Net that it is), has so many different factors involved when calculating where your site falls in their search results, that you have to be some kind of "web guru" to figure out what you need to do to get your site listed on the first page of results. Not only do keywords play a factor, but your site's construction and coding, the number of other "highly-ranked" sites that have links back to your site, the actual name of the URL for your website, your META tags..... UGH!!! It gives me a headache!

Wikipedia tried to explain PageRank, but I find I'm more confused after reading it! To me, it seems like a lot of "coderese" (kind of like "legalese" when talking about the language of lawyers & lawmakers).

As far as I'm concerned, the Net has be hijacked by programmers who want only programmers to matter when it comes to the Internet! What I mean is that, since the whole "PageRank" systems were created BY programmers, it's only those that understand and "speak the language" that get ranked higher. It used to be that if you knew a little HTML or had an HTML WYSIWYG editor, you could put a site up online with nothing more than the knowledge of the content of your site. NOW the coders have thrown all these monkey wrenches into the mix that get you buried behind those that know all the "heavy-stuff" of site creation. Is there a lot of site on the internet clogging the works? Probably so. It's just that I find this all very frustrating. I guess it's all this "inbound links" stuff - links back to your site that seem to make your actual page content take a back seat to other sites that may have less content than YOUR site - but have a better "PageRank" than you have because so many other people have sent links back from their site AND those other sites, too, have a high PageRank.

It just seems kind of "click-y" to me! So unless you get into this "cyber-click" and start doing things "the Google way" (aka- the coder way), just being a country-bumpkin who barely knows how to do simple modern computer operations (like turning it on or using a mouse to 'click on' what you want) but happens to actually know what they're talking about, will get shoved to the bottom of the cyber-pile of search results when people do a search for what may become a "popular" search term/keyword.

So get with the program people - and PROGRAM! Type your life away with endless drivel! That geek who spent his whole life sitting in front of a computer typing endless lines of code has his site ranked above yours! Where's the justice? How is it that the social outcasts are the most popular now - while still being anti-social?!! WTF??!!! Are not words enough to move the world anymore?!

Frustrating!! PEOPLE - THERE IS A WORLD OUTSIDE OF CYBERSPACE!!

Go into the light! It's called the SUN!!