I did a google search for “washington dc poetry readings” and was surprised to see that dcpoetry.com is (as of this writing) not in the top ten results… nor even in the top 20.

So I’m doing an experiment. I changed the title tag for the homepage from “dcpoetry.com” to “Washington DC Poetry Readings.” And I added a link from this site to dcpoetry.com, with the link text “DC Poetry Readings.”

If you haven’t done so, you could also help bump up the ranking for dcpoetry.com by linking to it from your blog/website, if you live around here, or whatever. But bear in mind that the text of the link is significant. It’s not enough to just create some kinda silly link that says “smiling ponies.” If your link says “Washington DC Poetry Readings” then google will take that as a testimonial that the site to which you are linking is, in fact, a site featuring Washington DC Poetry Readings.

Link text is very important in google rankings. It’s the reason I rank 2nd in searches for my first and last name even though my last name appears nowhere on this site. There are many sites that lie about what it is they contain, due to some profit motive, or other motive. It’s much harder to get other sites to lie about what you are; thus, the search engines understandably put an emphasis on what other sites say you are.

Meanwhile, dcpoetry.com ranks #1 in google for this search: “washington DC poetry history.” No doubt this is because there’s less competition for those keywords. That is, the word “history” does not figure as prominently in as many sites as does the word “readings.”