Here’s an SEO tip – go ‘topless’

I don’t have a ton of experience with search engine optimization, but what I do know is going topless helps.
No, I’m not sitting at my laptop without a shirt on. I am fully clothed. Trust me.

But this blog – “Letters From Away” can be found on WordPress and Blogger – is part Maine news aggregation, part commentary, and part childhood reminiscing.

As part of that Maine news aggregation, I posted a link to a couple of stories about a march by women in Portland, Maine, in early May. It was a topless march. I believe organizers intended to show that women have as much right to go topless as men, that to march topless “empowered” them.

This blog entry is not going to touch on whether the message – or the method to convey that message – worked.

Of course, I tagged or labeled the link with “topless,” “nude,” “nudity,” as well as with “march,” “demonstration,” “protest.”

On May 4, there were 84 visits to my blog and that link by people typing into a search engine “topless,” “nude,” and “nudity.” The next day there were 203 visits just to that link via search engines. It dropped off to 40 the following day, but every day since then there have been at least a handful of visits routed via searches for those words.

And this past week, a student at the University of Maine at Farmington led another topless march, this time in the sleepy college town of Farmington, Maine. I posted links to a couple of the stories written about the march and a link to a witty commentary suggesting there were far more important battles to wage than whether it is “empowering” to walk around without a shirt on.

There were 45 visits Friday (April 30) to this blog – visits via search engines – and links to those stories. There were at least another 53 visits on Saturday and, so far, at least 67 70 today. [By the way, the numbers are for the WordPress version of the blog. I haven't gotten around to figure out metrics for this version.]

Don’t get me wrong. I truly enjoy that people are finding their way to the blog. I’m hoping that it will help me wrangle a job out of it soon.

It’s just that I can’t help but envision some teen boy hunched over a keyboard, the only elimination in the room coming from a computer screen, as he types in “topless” or “nude” or “nudity,” stopping ever so often to hear if Mom or Day has stepped on that creaky board in the hallway. I suppose access to search engines are to today’s teens what Playboys under Dad’s bed were to an earlier generation.

Of course, the other possibility is that some slack-jawed sexual deviant is online for his – or her – daily skin fix.

It’s just that it seems there are more important things to be doing that marching topless – or searching cyberspace for that sort of thing.