Thursday, January 25, 2007 Toral: Conquering search engines By Janette Toral Digital Filipino
I JOINED an SEO competition, organized by SEO Philippines, that began last Oct. 29 where entries had to compete for the keyword “ituloy angsulong.” The objective of the contest was to obtain top rankings in MSN, Yahoo and Google.
The prize is per search engine and the overall winner is the one with the highest accumulated score in all search engines.
What makes the contest exciting was that everyone had to use all the techniques they know to increase one’s ranking. Of course, some used quality content strategy as the key for gaining better search engine rankings.
Others use the keyword to link to their pages even if it doesn’t make sense for the website visitor anymore.
Last December, a lot of the entries hosted in Blogger.com found themselves in a dilemma when they started migrating their blog to the new and really beautiful version. Search engine rankings went haywire. That was one scenario where one can be in the top 100 at one time and be gone the next.
In my case, it took almost three weeks to stabilize the rankings. I even had to stop updating my site for 13 days just to wait for Yahoo, MSN and Google to capture my latest page. This is when I also realized who is the quickest in updating their cache content.
It took MSN 11 to 12 days before it captured my Jan. 11 entry; Google turned out to be the fastest.
Another challenge was beating the content agg-regators in getting one’s entry recognized first. When my blogs were still new, I used services like Pingomatic.com to alert RSS feed readers of my updated content.
I haven’t been able to do that diligently lately. I realized later that one can’t allow aggregators to beat a content owner in getting recognition, especially when you are in a competition like this.
The contest will come to a close on Feb. 23, during which winners will be announced. Calculating when one should update to ensure existence in all three, capturing your latest entries and taking first ownership of these are vital tasks.
In the end, the competition is like a crash course where you use your time and energy to learn and put your search engine optimization knowledge to test.
As Stephen Covey said in the 8th Habit, the more you know, the more you don’t know. With all the knowledge validation gained —with one’s blogging habit ignited and nice projects coming in — I’m a winner already.
PIGS. I’ll be one of the judges in the 1st PODD Art Contest – Pigs on Parade. The Philippine Offshore Design and Development Corporate (PODD) is organizing this contest to celebrate their second year of operations.
The theme of the contest is “Year of the Fiery Pig.” You can find out more details at http://www.poddcorp.com/ Winners will be recognized on Feb. 2 at the Parklane Hotel in Cebu City.
BLOGGING SUMMIT. On April 13 and 14, iBlog3, the Third Philippine Blogging Summit will take place at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City.
Interested resource persons are more than welcome to propose a topic paper. They can visit http://www.iblogph.org or e-mail me at jtoral@iblogph.org for more information.
