Graphing your Website (or Blog)

I was watching The ScreenSavers tonight on TechTV, yes because I'm a geek, duh. Anyway, they showed a neat little project called TouchGraph. Some of the stuff on the site didn't make that much sense to me, mostly because I didn't bother to read it, but the TG GoogleBrowser was what i really wanted to play with anyway.

Basically you just put in your URL in the field that is provided, click "Graph it!" and go. Oh BTW, it does require Java 1.3 or higher. Don't know if you have it? Well try running it. If it works, you do! If it doesn't, click here. (WebTV and other TV based Internet applicances will not work no matter what you do, they aren't "smart" enough to handle Java, plus the software is developed by Microsoft and they don't like Sun and Java.)

It's mostly a toy but it can tell you how your site links to others. It can be misleading though. The data comes from Google and if Google hasn't "touched" your site in awhile (or at all) the results may not reflect your current site and its' links.

I discovered that the format that I used to create a unique and fun design (layers) prevents Google from "spidering" my website properly. I also discovered that my logo, which is a Flash image, misleads the search engine spiders too. I am now armed with information that will allow me to modify my site so that it is more search engine friendly.