Dave’s Ramblings

To answer a question, A brief overview;

Ever wonder why your blog appears near the top of search engine rankings when you search on the name, or want to know why it doesn’t and how to fix it? Here’s a little insight for you, for the moment I’ll stick to my understanding of Google and MSN searches.

Keywords…. how often is a particular string of words used on your blog (or web page), there is also some figuring of the context that it is used that is taken into effect, much more complicated than most would care to know, so don’t go crazy and insert your keywords over and over again without any other surrounding text. The same thing applies to page title’s, heading strings, and the URL.

“AnchorText” here is the real key to getting to the top of a particular search (again Google and MSN specifically, Yahoo doesn’t seem to follow this rule as much). It’s really not complicated at all… all you do is target your keyword as the actual link to the page/site you want. For example if your link looks like this

a href="http://blog.captivereefing.com" Dave's Ramblings /a
I removed the <> ’s so you could see the link.
Search engines take the anchortext ‘Dave’s Ramblings’ and give it a specific amount of weight for each instance it encounters out there in the rest of the www. Most instances of this that are found combined with the preceding paragraph the higher your ranking will be. Think about this when swapping links, while the link itself is a good thing, a link with good anchortext is even better!

With enough backlinks targeting specific keywords you can fly towards the top of any search for those words.

There is a lot more to it than this, but armed with this basic knowledge you are on your way to the top.

Good Luck!

Remember that song as a kid? Hope it gets stuck in your head for at least a few hours

Apparently Tori is trying to teach her pups (just a week old now) what good eating is all about (pictured is a chipmunk). She’s constantly reminding us that she is a natural hunter. Once we get this litter moved on mayhaps this fall I’ll be able to get her out in the back woods with me and do a bit of hunting and see how well she takes to it. I’m guessing she’ll take right too it.

A new Blog Traffic exchange fired up today…
Blog Soldiers

Sign up today and give it a whirl.

By now everyone has seen the machines at Walgreen’s, stick you CD, floppy, SDRAM, Memory Stick, whatever media you have into the machine and select the pics you want printed and presto you should have pictures. We’ve been looking at them for quite some time now, always saying one of these days we’ll have to try that and see just what they really produce. Tonight just for grins I transferred a few pics to a SDRAM card (actually SD/wifi card for my cell phone/pocket pc), we stopped by a local Walgreen’s on the way to dinner (in celebration of Angel’s 42nd birthday or putting up with me for the past 7 years…not sure which). Back to my point here, what kind of quality can these things really produce? The pictures were taken with our now antiquated Kodak 3.2Mpix camera that will last us until we can swing the big bucks for an 8+Mpix SLR, popped in the card, selected the images and told it I wanted 5×7’s to sill a new picture frame for my office at work. Waited a couple of minutes for them to be printed and to say the least I was truly impressed.

I wasn’t expecting much given the somewhat low resolution, but figured a 5×7 couldn’t be too awful. The end result when placed next to my daughters school taken picture by a ‘pro’, who’s probably got half the time behind a viewfinder than me, aside from the glossy finish of the digital print they are very comparable in quality. Why we waited so long to try it…. we’ve seem the ‘photo quality’ printers in action, we have a pile of them in the basement collecting dust. We’ve taken over 5,000 pics this year alone, never intending to print any, but we store them on CD’s and stuff instead. Think it’s time we dig through some and print out some more.

The only question that really bugs me, why on earth can a 4×6 print cost $.29 and a 5×7 be $2 ??? I know the cost of photo paper, I’ve developed my own B&W and color prints, yet the math just doesn’t add up for me. Got an answer?

Friday after work I took the baby pups to our vet and bought myself a little education, being English Springer Spaniels they needed their tailed docked and of course have any dewclaws removed. Either I never paid close enough attention before or it’s more common amongst pure breeds that not every pup will have dewclaws, or may have only some. If we decide to breed Tori again we won’t have to bother our vets any more to dock the tails and stuff either. Anyone else ever hear of a vet actually willing to teach a client how to do these things and share all the tips, tricks, and tools to do it all, knowing it means a potential loss of revenue on their part? I will not trust any of our ‘furry children’ to anyone else’s care. We’ve always taken care of all of their shots and stuff, minus rabies since we can’t buy them any more, not sure maybe too many people snorting or injecting the vaccines or something…who knows?

Hunter is still down 11 pounds or so from his usual 60lbs, yet another blood test drawn and we should have the results tomorrow. Crappy Lyme’s disease ridden deer ticks around here nailed him real bad last year, we thought we had it beat, but he went downhill fast earlier this month. 2 weeks of anti-biotics brought down the lumps in his neck and he’s acting a bit more normal, just gotta fatten him back up a bit. So much for getting him started pheasant hunting this year. Got all of the dogs shaved short of Remington (the sire of the current litter), I just haven’t had the time to get him done. With the Front line squirty things and shaving it sure helps with the ticks, one of the downfalls to living out in the boonies I suppose. Haven’t seen one since they were treated, so I know it’s working.

Puppy pics coming tommorrow, Angel is supposed to be forwarding them to me from her laptop so I can post them. Anyone looking for a pup just drop me a note and I’ll pass along our contact info.