GlobalWarming Awareness2007 - SEO World Championship Contest Site

So after submitting my site to the big three late on the 24th, both Yahoo and MSN have hit the site (along with a handful other bots I didn't ask for). So far only MSN is saying it has heard of this site but I'm not placing very well in the results for "globalwarming awareness2007". Thats OK, there are months to go and I have not done anything that would generate external linking to the site. Still waiting for googlebot to show up.

I looked at some of the competitor sites again today. Specifically I was looking at how they were generating links. Welcome to the world of reciprical linking. When you look at the back links for some of the sites you find a whole realm of misused and abused link submission directories, public bookmrks and Dig or reddit wanna be sites. Now there are a couple schools of thought on the value of forming link affiliation. For my part I thought quality was a factor in the equation but my beliefs are being challenged by the top links to the winning sites coming from hundreds of these little nothing sites that have absolutely no relevance to globalwarming awareness2007.

While I am waiting to be indexed I decided to check out some of the competition and I must say it is clear what a number of the most popular tactics are for the leaders.

For starters it seems like repeating the key words "globalwarming awareness2007" frequently is one way approach to getting the top spot that is working. Some of the leaders have the phrase (globalwarming awareness2007) more than 100 times in their front page. The raw number does fluctuate a little as you look through them but I have noticed that the top sites have a "globalwarming awareness2007" density approaching but not quite 3%. I find the density bit interesting and I too can repeat globalwarming awareness2007 over and over again. And perhaps I will in a fashion a little less obvious than this paragraph. But I hardly see how this would a practical for a real site trying to win favorable SERPS for perhaps hundreds of key words.

The site is up, the logs are being collected, and thanks to my hosting provider Urchin shows me how many sessions I've had while tweeking things. The only think not working quite right yet is the site maps functionality I added. It seems no matter what I do google always tells me that it has errors even though I have triple checked the format.

I submitted to the search engines late last night and was surprised by some of the things I found.

Google's sitemap submission through the webmaster tools is a little buggy to say the least. It is not printing back out to me the URL I submitted for the sitemap but rather a blank space. It also doesn't allow me to submit more than one sitemap even though it accepts two different types of sitemaps (general and mobile).

Welcome to my entry site for the SEO World Championship Contest. Watch this site as I try to make it the most popular search result for "globalwarming awareness2007".

When I heard about this contest recently in the Yahoo Web Analytics forum I thought what a great exercise to show how web analytics can be used in connection with SEO efforts. My hosting provider supplies Urchin for Stats Reporting and access to the web logs so I will have access to Google Analytics like reporting as well as the ability to parse the logs for deeper details.