Building a Web Presence

Building a Web Presence
by Jeff Lewis

After tracking the hits to my work-in-progress website, Prancyhorse.com—which receives approximately three hits a day from non-relatives—I’ve devised an intriguing strategy for building a diverse internet audience. Because Prancyhorse.com has a wide variety of peculiar phrases, it features very prominently in certain web searches. For instance, someone accessed the website because it is the top Yahoo! search result if you type in the phrase “rat proof composter.”

Interestingly, I’ve found that many of the strangest searches have come from abroad, which may be my ticket to an international presence. So far, I’ve gotten a smattering of hits from odd search results (my definition of international includes “red” states). Here are the subjects of some notable searches, the location of the searcher and Prancyhorse.com’s search engine ranking for these searches:

Mikhail Barishnikov—Morocco, Montreal, New Zealand, Taiwan, North Carolina; if I spelled his name correctly, nobody would notice, but Prancyhorse.com is the #6 website in Yahoo! for searches on this particular misspelling.
Paris Austerlitz Train Station—Brazil; ranking unknown.
Spanish separatists—China; ranking unknown.
Beaver dam destruction—Calgary; ranking unknown.
Jeff Lewis Vancouver—Edmonton; #1 in Yahoo!
Train From Madrid Nice—The Hague, Netherlands; #3 in Yahoo!
Nice Train Station—The Hague, Netherlands; #5 in Yahoo!
Isaac Misrahi designer—Virginia, #5 in Yahoo!
Jeans paris hilton cutoff—Virginia, #1 in Yahoo!
The Cosby Show Quotes Elvin—California (not a “red” state, yet); ranking unknown.

I’m pretty sure everyone left my site disappointed, especially the person from the Hague, who no doubt wondered why he got tricked into clicking on my link a second time.

While on the subject of search engines, I thought I’d mention an interesting web page that I viewed recently. I’m sure you are aware that in the late nineties, there were oodles of search engines, but the varying fortunes of internet companies resulted in buyouts, bankruptcies and revamped business models. Today, many of the old search engine names remain—Ask Jeeves, Lycos, AOL Search, MSN Search—but nearly all get their search content from one of three sources: Yahoo!, Google and a volunteer-based engine called The Open Directory Project, which operates more or less like an open source program. For a fairly interesting diagram that tracks the relationships between the different search engines, see Bruce Clay, Inc.’s website. I also recommend this site for those of you who don’t care about search engines, but like colorful circles and arrows.

If you’re not satisfied with that link, let me throw a few more your way:

If you have a spare 45 seconds and would like to look at an interesting clock, check out the scribbly notebook clock. If you have another minute or so to kill, you might as well take a look at Clockblock.
I’ve never been terribly excited about kaleidoscopes, especially when I was a kid. I believed fervently from an early age that they are a collectable, not a toy. Nor was I particularly excited to find that a B & B in St. Andrews, Scotland, where I stayed back in 1995, was once owned by Sir David Brewster, the inventor of that slow-to-die fad. However, I recommend—with only a little reservation—a 21st century version, which, of course, can be discarded and forgotten the moment that you tire of it—unless there is some spyware hidden within the website that I’m unaware of. That’s not a very strong endorsement, so let me add this: it’s mildly fun and it will not clutter your shelves.
If you made it through the previous recommendations, you may like T.Y.P.O.R.G.A.N.I.S.M. This is an odd but stylish website that got me very excited when I saw a link to a Visual Composter. When I found that it was actually a music composer, my desire to view composted vegetable matter wasn’t satisfied, but I did enjoy creating a little ditty.
It’s not the right time of year to see this phenomenon, but during our road trip this past summer, we saw dozens of Asian tourists wearing what looked like welding visors to protect themselves from sun exposure. After a lengthy search, I tracked down a website that actually makes them look less loopy than they appear in person. I can’t rightfully say anything bad about a product that claims to cut out 99% of the sun’s UV radiation for only twenty dollars, plus shipping and handling.
When you hit the road to look for women in welding visors, you might as well keep your eye out for Muffler Men. These Paul Bunyon-esque fiberglass statues dot the nation, with a high concentration in the Los Angeles basin. If you haven’t gotten enough kitschy Americana after reading about the Muffler Men, go to Roadside America’s home page for all the roadside oddities that you can stomach.

With luck and a few more peculiar or misspelled words in my portfolio, maybe someone in Suriname will include Babblog or Prancyhorse.com in a similar list of whimsical websites. With that in mind, I close with this: Nobody reads a bedtime story like Peter Falk.

Mr. Lewis can be reached at jeff@babblog.com.