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When I'm not fumbling around with OneSci I can be found working having fun at the SDSU Center for Behavioral Neurobiology. However, I just finished my masters thesis and plan to work as lab tech (in New York) for a while and then try my luck applying to PhD programs in neuroscience.

SEO Search Engine Optimization

Here's a letter I wrote to a friend about his new website. I thought I'd share in case anyone is interested in my take on building a google friendly website.

I don’t have anything bad to say about wordpress; it’s probably the best blog software out there, and it can definitely work as a homepage. However, I just think that optimizing it for search engines would be quite difficult. Let me explain. Google has automated software (referred to as web crawlers, spiders, bots) that crawl from page to page on the internet and takes a copy of all the text on each page it visits (if you want to know how your website looks to a search engine spider, go to your homepage using firefox and press Ctrl+U [or Apple+U on a mac]). These spiders get around the internet by following every link on every new page they find. This is why some webmasters have a link to a sitemap somewhere on their homepage. This ensures that the google spider will index every page of their website. If there are sub pages on your website that someone cannot eventually get to simply by clicking their way there, then the spider will not find them. For example, if the google spider follows a link from someone elses webpage to your Simple Machines Forum, the spider will not be making a stop at your homepage or other blog articles, because as of right now, there are no links from your forum, to your homepage (at least that I can find). But anyway, the spider then sends this cached text version of your website to google for search engine ranking analysis. The text on your homepage (and any other pages that were cached) at the time it was crawled, dictate what google is going to use to rank your pages for various search strings entered by people using google. Thus, someone trying to get high search rankings for a particular set of keywords will have a much easier time if nearly all the textual content on their homepage isn’t constantly changing. Furthermore, if you eventually get into the top ten for a good search string, you don’t want to lose that good ranking. For instance, someone might google [anarchist news and discussions] and your website makes it into the top 10; well next week the google spider comes along and indexes the new content on your homepage, and you fall out of the rankings again. Just something to think about.

Getting people to visit, revisit, and participate, should be the primary concern of every webmaster. Getting high search engine rankings for relevant key words is the MOST important thing to get new visitors. Having interesting and provocative content is the key to getting return visitors. I can help you with search engine optimization; getting repeat visitors are totally on you ;-)

Let me know if you have anymore questions.

-Brad

Looking at Labs

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My First Computer

Well, not exactly, but it's the first computer I built myself.