Garaphernalia 7.5

I’ve massively cut down on the number of people I follow on Twitter. It was getting to be just too much noise. Following everyone who follows me just isn’t possible. I have created a bit of an ad hoc system of picking who to follow:

1) Do I know you? I don’t have to have met you in person, nor do you have to know me, but I should know who you are if I’m going to follow you. You could just be the author of a blog I follow. Even people who comment on my website, replied to one of my tweets, or have emailed me can make the cut. This is a pretty liberal standard.

2) Bots begone. If the Twitter account does nothing but send out updates and URL’s, its gone.

3) Do you have anything interesting to say? While I don’t want all URL’s, I also am not interested in nothing about “i’m going to the gym now”. You should have something interesting to say occasionally.

4) Have you used Twitter in a month? This shouldn’t be a big deal if all you care about it noise I guess, but I also don’t see why I should keep you on the follow list. It seems a lot of people got on the Twitter bandwagon and then jumped off right away.

I was following about as many people as were following me, around 500. I’m going to try to cut that to about 200.

From May 14 to May 20, I received 514 visits from search engines. Those 514 visits represented 358 different search terms.

I’ve been focusing on the term “travel blog” for SEO purposes because I really have no clue what other term to focus on. (My results for “travel blog” are getting better, but I don’t think they will ever be that good) I think my search engine results have increased as my content has increased, simply because there is more stuff to search.

I expect the search engine traffic to jump dramatically once my images are indexed on Google Image. There are fewer images than pages of text floating around the internet. I also need to step up doing more of the “seven wonder” posts. They get a lot of search engine traffic.

In addition to “travel blog” I’ve also started to put some emphasis on “travel photography” and “travel blog directory”. I do well in that last one, so that wont require a lot of work.

I have, briefly, made it to the first page of search results for “travel blog” on Google.

This is the highest I’ve seen it. I’m usually on the middle of page 2 lately.

I’ve also cracked the Technorati Top 10k. I think the two are related.

Wallaman Falls HD from Gary Arndt on Vimeo.