Tuesday, Aug 22 2006
After making it back into the top 20 of the ambtachdotcom seocontest, I've now got to get into the top 10... and I think I've got a solution.
For the last few days, my entry has been slowly dropping again... only this time from #11 last Thursday, to position #14 today.
Thankfully, not the meteoric plummet of previous weeks!
One thing I did notice recently that could be having an impact on my placement could be the "size" of my home page.
Coming in at around 7k, it is almost the "lightest" page in the top 20 to date.
The current top 10 places are - in order - 33, 18, 36, 29, 47, 58, 70, 28, 25 and 14k respectively.
Positions 11-20 are : 37, 31, 26, 7 (me), 29, 50, 6, 24, 54, and 31k.
You'll notice on THIS site, summaries of my "daily posts" are shown in the RHS of each page. They are there to dynamically update the page so Google sees something "new" everytime it visits.
Now, most of the other entries use the same principle... using blogger style posts to make changing content for the search engines.
Except that ALL of each new "post" appears at the start of the home page (not just the intro) that's how they really pump their page size up.
From an SEO viewpoint, I'm not too sure about that, as each new post changes ANY keyword optimisation going on with your home page, which is why the majority of my home page has been fairly "static", with the exception of the "posts" on the RHS.
Maybe an increase in overall page "size" for the home page of my entry might boost my places in the ambtachdotcom seocontest.
You see, maybe there just aren't enough words there to make Google think my entry is "as serious" about the ambtachdotcom seocontest when compared to the other place holders.
So.... I'll work on that today... by adding to the "static" section so I keep my keywords nicely balanced...
A good place to start would be to expand on the bulleted "Strategies" list now I've got some more information I can reveal...
I don't think I'll be giving away too many trade secrets if I do that!