Victoria was kind enough to share this story - and if this doesn't qualify for this site I don't know what does.
In part, the story makes the point that I hoped to get across in my talks on SEO. Content is ultimately king. The purpose of SEO is to drive people to your site and have them stay. If you don't have the content that people are looking for - they are going to leave.
How do you know your content is good? The press generated by the contest points out that the popularity of the author, the number of readers reading his site, and the links they made to his site are good indications. From Google: " PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value."
And how right they are. If people are regularly reading your content and 'vote' for your site by linking to it - it really does say something about the content you produce. It shows (in theory) that your content is actually worth while and that people appreciate it.
The un-ethical part of the SEO industry creeps in when people counterfeit links and create link farms to "trick" the search engines. Or worse - spam blogs to piggyback on the blog's popularity.
I mentioned a few "tricks" to improve your search engine placement in my talks, but I would argue that none of them are really tricks. They are just good web design practices and common sense.
1) Do your market research. Find out what your clients are actually searching for.
2) Design and write your content so that it actually provides the information your clients are searching for. (in an economical/efficient way)
3) Update your content.
4) Design your site to be standards compliant. Use tags and markup in the ways they were intended to be used.
5) Make your site meta data rich so that the brainless robots that spider the web can 'understand' what your site is about.
Don't worry about your seach engine placement. If your content is useful and relevant people will find it. If its really useful and relevant they will link to it. Or better yet - they will buy something from you! Or even better than that - they will buy something from you and tell their friends how great you are!!
The articles also pointed out precisely why I left my position at the last company I worked for. In a quote from a wired article about this competition, the winner said, "A lot of people are trying to increase their page rank unethical. I think if we show them (that) the best thing you can do is to write really good material, then hopefully, they'll spend their time doing that (instead of) spending time coming up with ways to graffiti other people's pages."
It wasn't so much that the work we did was un-ethical (the client's sites actually had the content people were searching for), but it was mainly a job that amounted to spraying "graffiti on other people's pages." How dull is that? Where's the challenge?
I left the position, but I have no problems sharing the information I gained from working in the field.
I hope that some of you have found the information I have been providing to be of some use. I also thank everyone that shares the information they find with the group. I will continue to update this page with that information as long as people find it worthwhile.
andre
LINKS:
The Original article that Victory told us about. Popular blogger enters SEO contest on a lark and wins.
A blog entry about the article. Reiterating many of the points in the original article. A nice touch is the notice at the bottom of his page "SORRY, COMMENTS ARE TEMPORARILY DISABLED DUE TO COMMENT SPAM"
Wired article about the contest and the winner.
Kevin has been kind enough to share another link.
Press Release Optimization: All Science, No Art.
Feel free to e-mail me links and ideas - and I'll happily add links on this site.
andre