Ranking for dummies (like me)

So I've finished the beta versions of the DigiWaiter suite for a couple of months now.
While there was still a lot of work to do on these 3 applications I decided my first priority at that time was to 'get it out there'.

When I finished the beta versions and looked at my site dolesoft.com (which was in my Scan4Cover days created with a 15$ template I bought from the templatestore.com) I realized I had to 'facelift' this too.

I installed Joomla! 1.0.8, a superb and opensource CMS system works great and is really easy to work with!!

I wanted 'it':

• to be downloadable
• to get some feedback from people telling me what was good and what was not so good about it

This way I would be forced by this 'chain reaction' to react to these suggestions and improve my program accordingly.

From that day on this ranking thing really got me!

As you may or may not know reading this line, I created a Point of Sale or POS software suite. If you enter "point of sale" in google you'll get 213,000,000 hits.

• christmas gifts: 70,500,000
• dog food 112,000,000

In comparison if you enter a more or less common word like automobiles you 'only' get 91,300,000.

Ok, some will say you have to put quotation marks around point of sale to have an honest comparison, that brings it back to as little as 35,600,000...

Looked like a 'mission impossible' to mingle my site amongst the top
rankers or even being listed with the first 100.

Where to start / which path to follow?

There's an awfull lot written about this subject, just enter pagerank in google and you'll get 103,000,000 hits.

Thirst thing I had to know is what things like pagerank really mean (remember I'm dutch that doesn't make things easier...). Examining Wikipedia made it more complex

As I've said there's a whole lot written about ranking but it didn't make any sense to me at that time.

I really needed a dummy guide!

Uhh I really wanted to write about all my experiences in this post but it's going to take up to much of my sunday afternoon time and I can see some pretty unhappy faces around here so I'll have to write a raincheck for this..

Last night I ended up at http://seo.googlerankings.com/ I should have found this one much earlier because it's related to google.

If you haven't already seen that one, it's a good starting point.

Take care,

Mike