For those of you who care, Google has what’s called “PageRank,” which is an indicator of a website’s relative importance in the schema of the web, based on a 1-10 scale. Although Google keeps a constantly shifting measurement of each site’s PageRank internally, they only update the external PageRank that’s visible to the whole web community once every 6 months or so. This blog has been a PageRank 3 site for a while, but Google just updated the external PageRank to a 4! Anyway, feel free to congratulate me, if you feel so inclined Regardless, I am a happy man.

I’ve decided that if I’m going to become more active in the SEO community, I shoul probably find a nickname/domain that is slightly less audacious than “Towering Intellect.” Frankly, I’m not smart enough to pull it off (yet). So I’m in the market for a new SEO name. I’d love to get Jazzcat.com and go as Jazzcat, but that’s not really a possibility at this point, as somebody else owns the domain. If you have any other suggestions, let me know.

I’m starting to realize that as I try to figure out this whole “well-rounded SEO” thing, I’m not 100% sure where to start. I feel like I have a million and a half things to learn, and extremely limited time to learn it, and I really want to get a solid foundation under me. So I’m trying to figure out which things are most important to learn first, and which things can come later. A couple of ideas I’ve had about trying to figure out what to learn first are as follows:

• Read SEO blogs and figure out what gets talked about most. Learn those things first.
• Just do it: build a site using a template, and start throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks.
• Ask knowledgeable SEOs what they recommend.
• Open it up to an SEO forum and see what comes back.

Of these, I feel most comfortable with the last two options. I don’t really want to have to reinvent the wheel if somebody else has already been there. So maybe what I’ll do is send a couple of emails to SEOs I’ve come to respect, and go out and post on some forums and see what I get back, before I decide what to learn first.

Michael Gray (a.k.a. Graywolf) has mentioned a site called Squidoo a few times, and today I finally decided to try it out. Squidoo, one of Seth Godin‘s pet projects, allows you to create a “lens”, which is essentially a collection of links and other web resources collected around one subject. Anyway, Graywolf has been talking about how some of his squidoo pages are ranking in the SERPs, and I figured I might as well get in while there are still some good lens names still available. I picked up a few today, and I’ll probably grab a few more over the weekend, it just seems crazy to not pick up some potentially valuable web real estate when it costs me nothing but the few minutes it takes to set up a new lens. I’ll keep y’all posted on how this works.