Technobiography

Lessons from my Beijing Olympics SEO experiment

Me and Dexter of TechAtHand.net had the same thing in mind when we each wrote an article entitled “Palarong Olimpiko 2008 sa Beijing”. We both wanted to get traffic from the Philippine homepage of Google search. The Google doodle (the image above the Google searchbar) was hyperlinked to search results for “Palarong Olimpiko 2008 sa Beijing” .

It was such a unique set of keywords and sure enough there weren’t many results with the exact phrase. Dexter’s article was the top result when I saw the keywords on Google on Saturday evening, the day after the Olympics opening.

Since I already had a pending Olympics article in mind, I decided I might as well entitle my article with the keyword. Thus my article “Palarong Olimpiko 2008 sa Beijing“.

I knew it was going to be a high traffic page. So over the next few days, I optimized the page a few times. These are some of the lessons I learned in this SEO experiment.

1. Use the exact search keywords as the title, then re-use the same or similar keywords in the first paragraph of the title. - This technique put me on the top 2 search results within two hours after publishing my article.
2. Embed videos or photos. Embedding videos or photos keeps the reader on your page longer. Reader is then more likely to click on advertisements while waiting for the video or photo to load.
3. Insert mid-article inline google ads. I don’t do this for all of my articles. But I do optimize high-traffic pages with mid-article google ads.
4. Link to google results from my search bar. When I search using my blog’s google search bar, some advertisements come out on the results page. Clicks on those advertisements are credited to me. Thus, I intersperse some google searches in my article so that people who click the link are offered search results with advertisements. I keep the search keywords relevant to the article. For example, “Beijing Olympics” .

That’s a sampler of some of the SEO tricks I used. I’m glad Dexter learned some from our little SEO jostling. I learn some SEO tricks from other bloggers too just by observing how they put together a page. It’s all good. We learn from each other, don’t we?

ka edong
Olympic SEO jostling