Just a quick layout update here. The look is changed*, but more important to me are the adjustments I made to the source code itself and to the source order.

With the source order, I moved the sidebar that used to be over to the left way down in the source order- it used to sit at the very top of the source order. Now the first stuff that spiders (and users with screen readers) see is pure content. Those of you with the web developer toolbar can turn off styles to see the naked goodness of the site now. It'll be interesting to see if the change enhances my search engine placement at all. Of course, I know the site is now a better, cleaner, experience for people browsing with screen readers and with text browsers, so that's a bonus whatever Google thinks about my changes.

*honestly, this has been a to-do list item for something like six months. When I moved over to WordPress as part of the site relaunch I didn't put as much effort as I could have into the theme. As time went on and I started to really enjoy posting on the blog again, the shortcuts I'd made with the layout and with the blog markup started to drive me a little batty. Thankfully I was able to steal some time tonight to start in on getting this section straightened out.

More to come as the days go by

O'Reilly Media — Search Engine Optimization More of a monograph than a book, this intro to SEO is a nice little primer on the sorcery that is Search Engine Optimization. A lot of it I knew already, but it's still nice to get a complete overview like this. If you're not familiar with the techniques and concepts, then I heartily recommend this thin download.

drunkenfist.com ranks 105,631 with Quantcast

Interestingly, they also provide demographic information:

"This site reaches approximately 14,368 U.S. monthly uniques. The site attracts a more African American, more affluent, slightly more male than female, teen and young adult audience."

Compete ranks me 92,116 with 15,802 US visitors.

Those numbers, at least in terms of visitors, are reasonably close to my actual numbers (according to Google Analytics.)

So why does Alexa rank me 525,696 (290,588 latest. But the above numbers are for May anyway and my traffic has increased since)? What are the other two sites doing that Alexa isn't? Is it something to do with the demographics of the Alexa user?

If you search for my site in the Ask.com search engine you get all of the old URLs and old content from the previous version of my site. Lot's of .shtm and .htm extensions show up in the results.*That's in spite of me (a) setting up permanent redirects to my new URLs and newly structured content and (b) setting up a valid sitemap.xml file and seeding my robots.txt with the proper autodiscovery instructions. Supposedly they support both, but I get nothing. The only stuff that does show up from the new site is my blog. Which is all well and good since I like this place, but my blog is not the focus of drunkenfist.com, so getting Ask to look at my newly formatted/updated content would be extremely beneficial for me.

Check it out and pray for me as I research this little snafu**…

drunkenfist.com site:www.drunkenfist.com – Ask.com Web Search

*That's especially lame as the .htm files haven't physically existed for probably 6 years.)

**Truly one of the great acronyms: Situation Normal: All Fucked Up

Digital Graffiti Letter R Wild Styles- Rob Larsen : DrunkenFist.com

According to Analytics it's the fourth most popular page on my site with 3,892 page views over the past month accounting for nearly 3% of all page views on the site. A lot of those are entry views because, up until last Friday, this page showed up on the first page of this search- "graffiti – Google Image Search"

Let me say- Arrgh!
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