I noticed that the front page has made it to page rank 5 on the toolbar. It's questionable how meaningfull that is... Depends on who you talk to. But I think it's pretty cool. It's basically Google's way of saying what they think of the page and 5 is pretty good. It goes all the way up to 10 but each level gets progressively harder. I've never seen a PR 10 site outside of Google itself. Most sites are 5 or less, so it's unlikely we'll ever get to 6 but you never know.

Now the trick is to get the other pages ranking well, too. I don't do very much search engine optimization (SEO) on here. Mostly I just keep trying to add good content. I'm building this site for people, not search engines, after all. But I do try to do some basic stuff like making sure I have good keywords in what I write and linking to the site wherever I can. If anyone has any good spots where they can link here, that would be awesome. Every little bit helps.

While we're on the subject, I'm curious... When you search for local stuff online, what sort of keywords do you use? Say you wanted to find a place to eat. You can't just type "restaurant" into Google and expect to find a local one. So do you type "Onalaska restaurant"? The reason I'm asking is that we actually get very little traffic from search engines. PR5 doesn't do us a lot of good if we aren't ranking for the stuff people are searching for. That's something I hope the area directory will really help with once I've got a lot more stuff in it. Even though the primary focus of this site is the "Connect", we need more to get people to come to the site and that's where the "Explore" part comes in.

Michelle