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Losing My Google-fu

Yesterday Cathy had the great idea to post the Human H1N1 Swine Flu Map. (there are dozens but this one in particular by a person nicknamed Niman is particularly excellent) I followed her lead and also posted the map because I assume that Domestic Psychology and Reality Me have slightly different audiences albeit with some natural overlap. Her post stayed off the radar and mine jumped to the number one position in Google’s search results, Dogpile’s search results and CNN’s search results for the keywords "swine flu map" which was pretty cool. The post even hit digg (a first for me). The Internet is a fickle place. At the time I began composing this post, I was in 4th position on Google and not even on page 1 for CNN or Dogpile. By the time I finished typing this I was in 5th position on Google. The programmer in me wants to jump over to Cathy’s site and figure out why mine seems to have SEO’d well and hers didn’t. The marketer in me is kicking me for not having redesigned the appearance of Reality Me yet to make it more inviting for visitors to want to continue reading. The bounce rate on this moment of fame was incredibly high. Basically, the landing page gave the visitor no reason to stay on the site. That will have to be fixed…in June. Never judge a web developer by his own site. My time needs to be spent on my clients’ sites. Now back to work!