Tuesday, January 13, 2009
How we won the #velociroflcoptersaurus SEO competition
So recently Amnesia and Happener ran a SEO competition for the phrase velociroflcoptersaurus.
We were lucky enough to win the competition so I thought I would share the process we used.
1. Domain Name Selection
When we started optimizing I had a look at the competition, there were a number of domains like velociroflcoptersaurus.com and velociroflcoptersaurus.org, which had clearly been recently registered and looked like wordpress style sites. They were ranking highly already. So there is clearly some value in having the keyword in the domain name
Despite that - it is well known that Google typically sandbox’s new domain names, or at least values older domains over newer ones - so our initial thoughts in creating a new domain like velociroflcoptersaurus- velociroflcoptersaurus.com were bypassed. We weren't sure a new domain would actually add huge value despite the keyphrase being in the domain name.
As a result I decided to use our existing domain, which is 2-3 years old and has a PR5 on the homepage. Probably a stronger base point than a newly registered domain.
2. Page Creation.
We created a file path and file name that used the phrase velociroflcoptersaurus twice, I'm not sure if this matters but it does seem to be a factor.
shiftedpixels.com.au/velociroflcoptersaurus/velociroflcoptersaurus_home.aspx
In the page itself we ensured the keyword was found 3-4 times in each
We created website copy that was at least 30% unique compared to any other website out there (we actually lifted the content from a number of sources and did some find replaces.) It's our understanding that you want your pages at least 30% unique for google to think your not a copycat. (Of course 100% unique is best)
3. Blog Content
We created a blog post using the velociroflcoptersaurus keyword in both the title and the content. This blog post was syndicated out to 100+ RSS/Blog directories that we had previously registered our RSS/Blog feed with.
In the blog post we had multiple links to our SEO page that used velociroflcoptersaurus as the link text. This meant that we automatically had 300-400 keyword dense backlinks from high PageRank blog aggregators when we first published our blog post.
Our page was picked up and was top 10 in google within 24 hours.
4. Onsite Linking Strategy
We created thousands of internal links from all the Shifted Pages to our velociroflcoptersaurus SEO page. We did this quickly by adding links to our website templates for our Blog Pages, our Content Network as well as homepage and service pages. Most of these pages were already google spidered and already had a reasonable PageRank.
Bascially we leveraged the strength of our existing website content creation efforts with heavy numbers of internal links using the keyphrase as the link text.
5. Offsite Linking Strategy.
I added velociroflcoptersaurus backlinks from the footers in the web design templates on every page of 2 of the websites that I control – iTrainer and BuzzNumbers. Owning a number of websites on different servers and IP ranges definately gives you an unfair advantage.
I emailed a few friends who had websites and asked them to add small links in the footer of their websites to my velociroflcoptersaurus SEO page. www.TechWiredAu.com and www.SynthLords.com were 2 sites that helped me out. I owe them link love for the future now.
I heavily twittered the URL to my velociroflcoptersaurus SEO page which meant the URL was syndicated throughout many blogs and twitter content aggregator. I also noticed that my Twitter Page had a pagerank of 5 so I changed my profile URL to our velociroflcoptersaurus SEO page.
Conclusions for SEO
- Unique content and keyword density is important
- Use keywords in your H1 and Bold tags
- Internal linking strategies can work wonders
- Syndicating content from other websites keeps your site “fresh”
- Joining RSS/Blog Syndication networks is powerful
- Link Text is really really important
- Ask your friends for backlinks
- Shamelessly tweet your URL Content as often as you can.
Note: This process is not a typical corporate SEO process, and was only put in place to rapidly own SERPS for a 2 week period. If you want sustainable long term SEO results, feel free to give us a buzz +61.2.9360.0777
Labels: Velociroflcoptersaurus
Posted by Nick HaC @ 2:08 PM
