View from my comfy chair at Barnes and Noble. January 10, 2007 4:50pm

It's 9:00am on Saturday as I type these words. Man...it's early for me to be up. But I'm awake now so I might as well write a quick blog before heading out to dance class. If I can get out of the house by 10:30am I can get an early Argentine lunch at El Patio, yum!

So this past Wednesday, officially my website's 11th birthday, there was no big party like I had last year. I did receive a few congrats via phone calls, text messages, myspace comments and emails (thank you everyone!).

Instead of partying, I went into geek-mode I spent the the day in the library, um, I mean Barnes and Noble learning about the technical side of improving DCFlamenco.com, my birthday gift to you (and me!). So I curled myself up in a comfy chair and read (mostly skimmed) through three books:

which attempts to explain the myriad of beautiful information-rich charts and graphs that I use to analyze the traffic coming to DCFlamenco.com. Pretty cool stuff cuz I can learn about which pages on my site are the most popular, how long my readers stay on a page, how many times they return to my site over time, the most popular keywords that my readers use to find DCFlamenco.com etc. Plus I can learn which pages are the least popular, which odd keywords if any that people use to find my site in search engines, not to mention screen resolutions, operation systems, whether they use broadband or dialup, which country they surf from. For my fellow webmasters this kind of info is ordinary stuff. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There's so much info that I need a book like this to guide me through it all and help me interpret it so I can use the data to help me improve my website.

Since this site has been around for 11 years now, it has resided on quite a few different web hosting services, so many in fact that the format of the page and the file directory structures are so varied that it's confusing even for me. I've worked hard to clean things up over the years, but with a website like DCFlamenco.com that numbers in the hundreds of pages there's still some work to be done. As a result, my readers ocassionally will try to access a specific page but frustratingly instead get error messages such as "Page not found." Anyway, the book pictured here explains ways to create helpful error pages that can help my readers and even help me by such things as automated email notifications when error pages are generated.

This is one book that I've poring over the past few weeks--I even blogged briefly about it in December. Yeah, it's true, I use Barnes and Noble like a library--reading books from cover to cover over time without actually buying the book itself. I hope to redeem myself here by promoting the book here and hope that some of my readers will buy the book.

What is search engine optimization? First of all, search engines like Google for example, have these computer programs called robots or spiders that "crawl" my site and index all the text from my webpages and use it to build a database from which people can find relevant info on Google. Just about every word you see on this page will soon be indexed by Google (which crawls my site about once a week). Anywayz, these robots and spiders work a certain way to filter out all the unecessary info like computer code that's only useful to computers and tries to outsmart deviant webmasters who try to fill-up their website with popular keywords with the hope to boost their ranking on the search engines: the ultimate goal is to get on the first page for a popular search term. For example, DCFlamenco.com shows up on page two of a search for the term "flamenco" on the Google search engine.

These robots and spiders are very sophisticated programs and I just want to make sure that they find all the relevant info on my website so that you my current readers and my future readers will easily find my site and the information you need. Search engine optimization is basically how to make sure my website is easily "readable" by these robots and spiders.

Whew! I know this was probably more technical stuff than you would want to read about on a blog that's supposed to be about flamenco. But I just wanted to give you a feel for what it takes to create and maintain a popular website. And it's really not geeky at all when you compare it to flamenco. C'mon. I know you dancers out there are spending time in the studio working for hours on a step and trying to make sure it fits into the compás. On a mechanical level, it's physics and mathematics. It's something you gotta get out of the way so you can focus on the artistic side and express yourself. Same thing with this website.

As usual, just when I generate the steam to really write, I run out of time, so here are a couple of pics I took yesterday. And I'll just leave some brief commentary...