I saw an interesting post today via Twitter from a local person hosting an SEO competition to see who gets the highest Google search result for the key words zompire dracularius. I am officially throwing my hat in the ring. Recently I have been investigating how good semantic markup (including RDFa/Microformats) in the front-end will improve or change the way search engines work — basically how POSH (plain old semantic html) delivers data directly to the browser with particular markup. For the purposes of this test I have employed some semantic markup techniques, plus a few other tactics to raise the visibility of my post:
- Using RDFa in my posts (dublin core)
- Creating a “human readable” URL for this post using permalink structure built into WordPress
- Providing links to the original post and other sources (I will attempt to trackback, although no trackback link is published)
- Send to social networking sites I participate in — this is done automatically when I publish a post on my blog to Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook
- Attempt to leverage my blog’s overall visibility to force my post about zompire dracularius to the top
- Leave a comment on the original blog declaring the contest
- Have an adequate number of references to “zompire dracularius”
While it seems a little “Black Hat SEO”/ dirty to me, I will ignore that feeling for a while for the purposes of the experiment. Results to come!
