A Search Engine Experiment

I noticed that my web site development site got a visit by someone who found it in a search for “hank hill quotations.” I haven’t put any effort at all into optimizing the site for that search term, so naturally I got curious and had to check it out. It turns out my site is #66 in Google and #32 in Yahoo for that search.

I have only the most minor, off-hand reference in the site. There’s a quotation from Hank Hill in my quotation database, which is a simple example that I put on my database programming page to give a little demo of what can be done with databases, for clients who aren’t familiar with their use.

So I thought to myself, “Self, if you can rank at #66 and #32 respectively in Google and Yahoo for that search term without even trying, could you do better if you actually tried?” And so I logged into my GoDaddy account and registered hankhillquotes.com. Then I set up a simple site with a basic database, which I populated with a few quotes from each of the major characters.

I plan on spending a few minutes a day adding quotations to the database, and over time expanding the site somewhat too — perhaps adding character bios, episode descriptions, things like that.

I’ll post my progress here and let you know what shakes out. Hopefully, there won’t be some mean-spirited person who comes along and puts major effort into outranking me. This is just a small effort on my part to see what happens.