Cruisemaniac.com

The domain that I own, that this blog is hosted on is www.thecruisemaniac.com. When optimizing the site for google and yahoo search-bot crawls, it dawned upon me that when I search for the term “cruisemaniac” on google, a number of sites pop up where apparently there is a porn-star by the username “cruisemaniac” . Now, beating this star to get my domain listed at the top is a tough task!!! That with porn being the most indexed category on any search engine… or atleast so I suppose…

But, this post is neither regarding the porn-star by rummaging the internet using “my ID” nor is it my feelings of vengeance regarding this character… It’s about the war of getting listed at the top of any search engine’s search resultset…
This is a sad state for “The Cruisemaniac!!!” But yeah, There was quite a bit i learnt in the name of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It’s a war people… A Holy War. The fundamental I guess is simple… To have a set of features that satisfy the searchability rules of the various web crawlers that the search engines use to span acros the web.

With that said, the idea is a whole lot more simpler today… Create a file called “robots.txt”, and work it up with a certain set of rules. Submit your site to Google, yahoo and other biggies… and then wait… Yeah??? Well… Nope…

These are the basic steps involved in getting your site to become searchable. Without the basic robots.txt file existing on my site, I’m being hit by about 4 different crawlers atleast 10 times on a daily basis, the crawlers being: GoogleBot, Slurp, Ask Jeeves, and an unknown brat called spider!!!

SEO is a nice way of working your way across the popularity ladder… But you gotta have nice content though…  That with my site hosting a blog primarily, the content on the blog is something that is of utmost concern when I’m expecting to show up on Google…
In addition to it, for the fact that I’m handling the Website and maintenance of NisargaIndia’s servers, I’m coming to realise the process involved, the prospects of keeping secure pages secure from the crawlers, keeping multiple domains on a shared host secure…  It’s a beautiful thought!!!

But till then, I’ll continue to hate that bloody Porn-Star… I Hate You!!!!