Search Engine Optimization

I've been working on a pseudo-web 2.0 page for a while with a friend of mine called dishAdish. The web site is a food review site focused on dish level reviews rather than just restaurant reviews. In any case, we developed the page from scratch using Ruby on Rails. It has been up for a while now and we're slowly starting to get more users, but it's a slow process. It seems like a lot of users come in from searches for misspelled food items. We seem to have reasonably high page ranking for misspelled words.

To increase our user base, we're starting to focus on various Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. It seems like the leading candidate is to get more incoming links to your site from other highly ranked pages. I'm not really sure how to go about doing this. Another area we need to improve is meta tags. At the moment we don't even use them, so we should be able to improve this pretty quickly.

We have a little widget that allows users to display the top dishes for a particular key word. We call it the Best Dishes widget. At some point I'd like to turn this into a widget which can be uses on other sites so people can take polls for, say, the best burrito. If we could enable people to add these to their blogs or MySpace page or something, that would definitely drive up links to our site.

WordPress for a Dummy

I set up a WordPress based blog on a different domain of mine. I would have been failry easy if my server wasn't so old. The version of MySQL on my server was too old for WordPress so I had to build a new version and run it separately. I had to keep the old MySQL around since it is used by a few other websites on the server. I didn't really know how to run two different versions, but a friend of mine, Ron, helped me get the MySQL server running. To do this we had to force the new version to run using different ports, sockets, log files, etc. Most of this was achieved with simple command line options during invocation. However, once I installed WordPress, I couldn't get it to connect to the database.

First of all, I had to find the right way to tell WordPress which MySQL server to connect to. This was achieved by adding the new port number in the server configuration (e. g. "localhost:12345" instead of just "localhost"). Even once I got this right, WordPress could not connect to the database. After trying many different things, I finally figured out the version of PHP WordPress was using was calling the older MySQL client. For the most part this shouldn't cause a problem except that the password hashing function changed from the older version to the newer one. Once I figured this out it was easy to remedy by resetting the passwords in the new database with the OLD_PASSWORD call to force the older style password hashing.

Now that I have the blog running I'll have to play around with plugins, templates, and other options. Sounds like fun, huh?