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Ninja SEO Competition

My journal of work relating to ninja and SEO.

Ninja's don't have nothing on me.

This page is a log of everything I do relating to the Ben March is a Ninja Competition. This will allow me to reflect on what I used for an SEO strategy. I'll compare my strategy with my coworkers strategy and hopefully in the end we will have a better understanding of SEO and what works best to get a site showing in search engine results for a specific keyword (in this case ninja).

4/11/2010 - So far I have tried to saturate my entire site with the word Ninja. I have placed it in the title of every page of my site. I have put it in the keyword and description meta tags behind all pages of my site as well. I have several blog entries relating to my SEO competition in which each post has the word ninja several times. Each post has a "Ninja" tag so that my blog has a category of Ninja that will show all of my ninja related posts. I have searched for my site from several different computers each with their own IP address by using variations of keyword searches like "ninja ben march", "ninja ben", "ben march ninja", etc and every time I find my site (which may be a long way down the list of results) I make sure to click on it so the search engine realizes that my site was found using the search term and that the requester (me) found the site relevant enough to click on it and view it. I think this may increase the significance of that search term with my website and over time the search engine may promote the sites relevance to the same search term; meaning the site shows up closer to the top of the search results when somebody searches for Ninja. I also make sure to NOT click on sites that are listed above me in the search engine results because I don't want to contribute to the promotion of those sites relative to the keyword I'm insterested in. The reason I make sure to use different computers or phones when browsing to my site is so late the search engine sees the requests from my site as being from different people (and not just some programmer nerd trying to get his personal site ranked for the keyword ninja on a whim).

Over time the search engines will index my site and find I use a keyword such as ninja all over on my site and then it knows my site must have something to do with ninjas. So far i think the most important part is to have a lot of content relating to the sought after keyword (ninja) as well as make sure your sites title, meta tags and headings "<h1> tags" have the keyword in them as much as possible. My keyword being ninja. Finally and probably the most helpful part of all is having other sites link back to your site. If other sites find your site valuable enough to make somebody want to link to it then it must be useful! If somebody puts a link on their site that takes people to my ninja related content then there must be some value to my content and search engines use that to help gauge a pages usefulness. The text used to create a link to my site is also important. The text is also seen as an indicator as what the destination of the link relates to. If the text of the link says "Worlds Best Ice Cream" and points to my site then a search engine is going to think my site is somehow related to ice cream. If the text has the words "Worlds Best Ninja" then it gives my site some credibility in the ninja keyword space.   These are all assumptions on my part, but hopefully by the time this competition is done I will have a much better understand of search engine optimization and I will have earned the right to call myself the SEO Ninja!