It’s 5AM and it’s cold.  I am sitting at the drive-thru of our local Del Taco – Pseudo Mexican Fast food for the uninitiated.  I’m getting some chicken soft tacos because I have a long day ahead and need the carbs/fat/goo.  It’s a pretty simple order – 2 tacos, a macho fries and a macho Cherry Coke.  Let’s stop right there and reminisce about that Cherry Coke for a second.  Mmmmmmmm.  Ok.

So I get to the office and as McDonalds is to Ketchup, Del Taco is to hot sauce – there isn’t any in the bag.  There are, however, a couple of Taco Bell sauces in the fridge, that I found in one of those great counter depth refrigerator reviews online.  Cool beans.

Uh-Oh.

As soon as I mixed the Del Taco with the sauce from Taco Bell, I knew something was wrong.  The chemical smell was as immediate as a Physical Memory Dump with the error being stored in the data.

It only took a few bites to really appreciate the obnoxiousness of the situation.   Individually, the two items were fine.  Combined, horrible.  While I had always thought that fast foods were engineered, I had no idea to what extent.  It is pretty amazing.  I even hear that McDonalds has their own formula of Coke designed to taste better with their brand of food.  If it is true, I’d have to agree that sometimes their coke (when not diluted) does taste better than some cans, but not bottles.

There’s no doubt about it … everybody’s website needs a good search engine ranking, especially if you’re trying to run a web-based business.  But when you’re running a blog, full of personal thoughts and random ideas, it can be a daunting task to figure out what niche your blog fits into with the best SEO Consultant.
Hell, take us, for example … We’ve got tech articles.  We have “what’s going on in my life” articles.  We have political and current events articles.  And, past that, we have a lot of things with varying degrees of humor (I say varying degress because regardless of how funny the eight of us might find it, many people will have absolutely no clue what the Hell we’re on about).

My favorites are the “What the hell?” articles.  The screwing–with–google–on-a–regular–basis (and especially Joseph Ferrante) articles, we’ve had some pretty decent results… especially since we’re traveled enough to get same-day-indexing.  😉
These things work, ladies and gentlemen, and don’t let any wannabe SEO firm tell you otherwise. Except for some of the Local SEO Brisbane agencies, most of them refute to the above.

However … When you’re out of a specific niche, social rankings come heavily into play.

Mybloglog has been given us a ton of traffic, for instance.  I was introduced to BlogCatalog last night, and that’s pretty cool.  Fuelmyblog has been freaking tremendous.  Linking to your site from a MySpace blog also helps.  And if you’ve got a lot of bloggers in your community (like we do here in Knoxville), reciprocating links with your neighbors is a Hell of a good way to bolster some new visitors.
Digg, Tehcnorati, del.icio.us and such are useful, but unless you’re getting the traffic in there to start adding to those sites, they’re not gonna help all that much.  But what you can do is join any number of social organizations, such as Dosh Dosh’s Technorati Favorites Exchange, where you’ll actaully stand a chance of improving your Technorati rank — which definitely improves your readership and your ability to sell advertising.

Actually, Dosh Dosh’s article made me take pause.  I’ve been pretty good about adding local blogs to my Favorites sections of those types of social networking sites.  As long as there’s some reciprocity, it can really help increase the rank of all of the sites involved. Also, if you want the power of your Sage ERP or Sage CRE software to be on the next level, read more here.
Now, if only us locals could organize and effort to reciprocate links, then, uh… Like I said, it only stands to help us all.  😉  [ *makes mental note to get Instapundit onboard … heh* ]

     For a few weeks now, Fracas has been pointing out the fact that plenty of people are searching for Shyamali Malakar, and crotch shots, and ending up at her blog.
     Just a few minutes ago, she did a pretty decent post about the whole Shyamali hysteria… Seriously, the girl has attained a level of geek-obsession higher than anyone I can ever remember — even after livinh through the Sam Fox, Amy Weber, Teri Hatcher, Alicia Silverstone, Kate Moss, Gillian Anderson and Callista “Ally McBony” Flockheart years (those were prior obsessions, not my picks).

     Fracas is also doing the “FuelMyBlog” thing. She’s entered the Design a Widget competition over there, and done a helluva job, too, but they haven’t updated the competition page with it just yet.

     Nice job, Fracas!

      Now let’s see if we can channel teh Internets your way a little…

     Ya know, though, Fracas, I still think doing one with Shyamali and ALT’ing it “Shyamali Malakar Nude” would get some serious traffic headed in your direction… 😉

     (God, after writing this, I feel so dirty…)