Being #1 on a Google search for panama + guide is easy. I want to be #1 on a search for "panama." Right now there are about 171 million pages indexed and getting into the rare air of the first page (top ten listings) is tough to do.
Right now on the top six search engines (All The Web, Altavista, Ask, Google, Live, and Yahoo) I have a total of 146 keywords listings that place, 93 on page one, 27 on page two, and 26 on page three. I use IBP to track keyword performance on the major search engines.
With many thanks to Chris (gamble at ukconnection dot com) I now have a working url_rewrite mod hack that does what I was trying to get done, thusly;
.htaccess in your root directory:
----------------------------------------------
RewriteBase /
RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteRule ^topicname1/$ /index.php?topic=topicname1 [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^topicname2/$ /index.php?topic=topicname2 [NC,L]
--------------------------------------------
create a new block called Panama Categories, that goes like :
-------------------------------------------
<li>
<a href="/">Site Name</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="/topicname1/">topicname1</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="/topicname2/">topicname2</a>
</li>
----------------------------------------------------
disable your existing topics block. Enable your new Panama Categories block, and in essence you have used the existing core code to create the same effect. The only difference is that you will have to add any new topics manually to your .htaccess and you panama categories block, which isnt a big deal.
Now, with that in place, the topics index as
http://www.panama-guide.com/earthquakes/ for example. This hack creates a work-around to get rid of the dynamic url ? which Google hates.
Now here's the funny part - since having implemented this hack I've noticed that I'm doing much better in Google, but I'm falling back a bit on some of the other search engines. I think this will be temporary as they get around to reindexing my site, and in the meantime google is eating up the non-dynamic URL's and getting down into the database. And, that's what I was after in the first place.
Anyway, I'm continuing to scratch away at the glass ceiling of Googledom, and sooner or later I will have the rankin'est English language website about Panama on the entire net. Then, I'll retire. Thanks for all your help.
Don Winner
www.panama-guide.com