Why am I here?

Because we said your presence on this page would help us get better grades.  In all seriousness, we've been getting a lot of questions about exactly what this project is and what it's for so it seems like a good time to explain what Rankmaniac 2012 is, why we are doing it, and how you are helping.

We are in the class The ideas behind the web and our homework assignment for the next couple of weeks includes a project called Rankmaniac Reloaded in which we are learning about search engine optimization (SEO) by doing.  The goal for all the teams in the class is to create a webpage that has an image ranked highly on Google and Bing image search for the query "rankmaniac 2012".

If this looks at all familiar to you it's because you have probably seen it before!  In previous years, other Techers have bombarded Facebook with links to their rankmaniac websites.  Now it is back with the fun twist of an image search!

So, why do we care about our ranks on Google and Bing?  Because we get better grades the higher our ranks are of course!  But again, there are more practical reasons.  Search engine users are more likely to click on the higher ranked pages, and for a lot of websites, more web traffic means more money.

Finally, you are here +1ing everything and reading ALL of our content and posting the link myrankmaniac2012.blogspot.com to your facebook and twitter and google + and your blog and your personal webpage because the more quality pages that link to us the better.  Basically, if other pages link to us, Google thinks we're more awesome and put us higher up.  If you want to know more about how Google does this, look up PageRank, the algorithm Google uses to rank pages.  If you don't want to look it up someone will do a post about it in the next couple of days (Bryan?).