How Ted Leonsis worked his blog to the top for a Google vanity search

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How Ted Leonsis worked his blog to the top for a Google vanity search

13th Nov 2006, 17:17 GMT

The Washington Post is running a story about AOL Vice Chairman, Ted Leonsis, discusses his dissatisfaction when he did an ego search on his name in Google a year ago and how he worked to change the Google search results by blogging at ted.aol.com. Leonsis started to post several times a day. Then he added links to lots of other bloggers, including those talking about local sports and that of another team owner and blogger, Mark Cuban. Those blogs, in turn, link to his blog. He also linked his site to the Capitals’. He added lots of tags to his blog posts, dropping names of famous people he dealt with. Nothing happened for a few weeks. But as months went by, the rankings began to change. “Ted’s Take” moved up the page of search results, and now Leonsis says he has an audience of 800 or 900 on a bad day, 12,000 to 15,000 on a good one. What the article fails to mention is something I noticed the other day at one of the AOL owned Weblogsinc (WIN) blogs, under the personal section (pictured left) and heading of “Weblogs, Inc Network” there is a link on every blog in the network to ted.aol.com. Permanent links like that from sites like Google Page Rank 8 Engadget and an aol subdomain will help a lot more than using tags and dropping the names of celebrities in posts, yes, even if you are Ted Leonsis. I’m sure by namedropping celebrities he picked up search queries for the celebrities, but new bloggers should be aware of the greater power of the network nepotism link effect. Looking over Leonsis blog most of his posts are short which I think has actually worked against more than helped on the Google front. Not saying he should be wordy purely for the sake of search engines, but he should provide detail for readers. Take posts like this one. Why does Mr. Leonsis think this is a “great analytical piece?” What is so great about it? Should we as readers just follow because he thinks it’s great? 15 word posts look more like linkblog entries. How should Google rank a post like this when further down the page there is ‘Meet Mickey Mantle’, ‘Go to Tahiti’ and ‘See the Rolling Stones’ (10 words combined)? For a wide open keyword like “great” or “analytical” or “Caps?” The links along the right make up much more text than the post, so Mr. Leonsis must be hoping that Google reduces the value of the sidebar when analyzing posts and pages this size. Fortunately, he received one comment that added a little additional context. The title is even less telling: “Some Analytics on the Caps First Month.” Leonsis must like using the word “great” as another recent post shows. How often do you label things “great” on your blog and not tell readers what makes it great? As a reader I’d rather be shown what makes something great, rather than just told it’s great and left there. If as a writer you aren’t willing to invest the time to tell me, why should I bother looking? Don’t get me wrong, bloggers can make short posts all day long, most every blogger myself included has done that — it’s your blog, your site, do whatever you want — but if a primary goal is, as Mr. Leonsis indicated in the article, to better impact search engines, then from my experience he would be better off writing longer posts like Mark Cuban, billionaire and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Doesn’t have to be thousands of words, but should be meatier than posts like the ones linked above. Leonsis also uses target=_blank links to open new windows for links on his own blog. Dude, we’re already on your site and want to navigate to another page on your site, don’t open the links in new windows. I can see doing that, maybe, for links in your blogroll, but not for links on your own site. You aren’t losing the surfer. If we are reading something, get distracted, we can always use the browser back button. Don’t get me started on sites that disable the back button or use too much AJAX or Flash which cripples the basic browser navigation functionality. I think it’s cool that Leonsis is blogging regularly, which is more than half the battle. Any celebrity, CEO, company officer that is getting mainstream media attention has a distinct advantage over those who aren’t. If people are already talking about and searching for you, it’s a lot easier to generate higher search engine rankings. And it doesn’t hurt when you own a blog network with Google PR 8 and can make your blog a subdomain of aol.com. Engadget didn’t start out PR 8. It grew into that by producing lots of high quality, detailed content. Using this as a guide, I would (and do) continue to recommend to all who ask me and are just starting out blogging to primarily focus on creating and publishing quality content that you are passion about.

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