Site Update

I mentioned before that this is one of my favorite blogs, but I didn't really say why.

In short, sci-fi, fantasy, and horror are amongst my favorite genres of everything (along with hardboiled detective stuff) -- movies, comics, role-playing games, film, music, literature -- all sorts of arts and entertainment and hobbies. And I'm not as active in them on a social level as I used to be, since I have recently moved away from my old life and friends and really don't have the time and money to invest in them that I'd like to, so this blog is really a chance to discuss these things and kind of "keep up" with them.

Above that, I'm really hoping this blog attracts people and engenders a cool, like-minded community of gamers and comics fans and so on, who want to discuss the subjects, and maybe even add posts of their own (Blogger has a cool feature, which allows me to add other Bloggers into some kind of team -- though I'm not sure if that means we would all work on this blog or our own because I'm still just getting started). And I know I just set it up a few weeks back and still haven't blogged here that much, but that's because I've been spending as much time researching all the stuff that goes along with blogging as I have been actually posting.

Things like blog search-engines, templates, how to add nifty buttons and gadgets and affiliates, finding sponsors cats like us care about, finding communities -- just all the same stuff that goes along with running my own website. And, if you haven't heard, there are a lot of changes in the works for the Internet, in general -- it's become such a bloated morass of, really, the same things -- that it makes for a lot of work to do. I mean, we now have portals to aggregate our fricking portals!

And in researching the posts I make in so many of my entries, I often end up poring over literally hundreds -- sometimes thousands -- of worthless websites, just to find the one article, word, person, whatever, it is I need. And that's because the search engines (yet another Internet function that has become completely bloated), return so many useless results -- most of which come up first!
I did a search yesterday, looking for information relating to a recently popular news item, and had my Google Preferences set to 100 per page. All but (an estimated) 15 out of the first 500 entries I found were the exact same article (each on a different site, of course) -- and about half of those I did find weren't relevant to my research! And the post I wrote turned out to be a total of about 200 words!

And my big thing about blogging, websites, books, movies, TV, comics -- the whole shebang -- is, and always has been: quality! Content is king! But who are we fooling? No one's going to find the quality content if it's buried underneath 500 of the same entries!

Not to mention that this is not always the case. Commonly, the first several sites that pop up in most search-engines are the most popular ones -- not necessarily the best ones, just the most popular -- and so a lot of other people link and surf to them, not because they are good, just because they are the first ones that show up.

But Google has begun beta testing their Accessible Web Search for the Visually Impaired, which not only uses their PageRank System, but evaluates the usability of each page -- proving they can incorporate the web accessibility guidelines to allow them to get more relevant information to a wider audience.

Do a search on both Google and the Beta Accessible Web Search for "online marketing." The number one result on both is the search engine marketing firm, USWeb. That's because USWeb created their site in Web Standards, and in compliance with Web Accessibility guidelines. Now, search both for "Internet marketing" and notice the difference: USWeb is #2 on the Accessible Web Search, but a distant #8 on the regular search.

This proves that Google could use this technology to great advantage for everyone, by weeding out the badly-coded sites which use what amount to trickery to improve their rankings. Which means when you and I do a search for "screws," the first few sites that appear might just have something to do with hardware! So, why doesn't Google just apply this to their current algorithm? Blogs, in particular, are known for their good coding because of their heavy design elements, which means we'd get higher rankings based solely on the fact that we are better-coded!

And I would love for my blog(s) and sites to rank higher because I do not resort to cheap Meta-Tag and Keyword methods to try to get them there... and they never have been. But I do take great pride in the appearance and functionality of works.

So, for all of you out there who have a site or blog and are wondering what the real, working methods of proper SEO are, look for companies like USWeb and try Google's new Accessible Web Search for better results and please let me know your results!

In the meantime, if you like what you see here and want to see more, please tell your friends! I try to update fairly frequently, even if I do take a week off, here and there -- because if you enter "RPG" or "comics" or anything else like that into a search engine now, you might be lucky to find a mention of me or my blog in the first, say, 23423450972 Results Found.