SEO Gone Mad (oh, and link bait for the Paralympics)

G'day:
OK, this is the weirdest one yet.  I was wondering why the hell my blog was so popular today - it's been my biggest day ever so far with a mammoth 600 hits - and I started looking at where the traffic was coming from, because basically unless Ray Camden mentions me on his blog, I don't get much attention.  I promote myself via Twitter and ColdFusionBloggers, but I basically don't exist on the 'net except for that.

Here's the weird thing.  At the moment, if one searches on Bing for "paralympic medal update", this blog ranks first. "paralympics medals": still above the fold @ 6th. Search on Google for "paralympics medal table", and I'm 8th (ie: on the first page).  What?



Here's my analysis of what this means:

• Is there such a paucity of Paralympics interest that my mere mention of it here ranks?
• Is SEO just a bunch of horseshit?

I think from the zeitgeist in London, the first one is just not true. People are well into it... not as much as the Olympics itself, but there is definitely a buzz about the Paralympics too.

So I think this bears out a suspicion I have had for a long time: SEO is ballocks.  All those people who claim to know how to work SEO? Snake-oil salespeople.

I've made no attempt at being search-engine friendly on this blog, other than to mention my name (look in the meta description tag), and repeat "ColdFusion" and "CF" as often as I can.  Which, let's face it, is quite easy (and appropriate) on a ColdFusion Blog (look: I just did it again).  I don't rank great in the area I want to, but I simply mention a current buzzword on a page on my site, and the mention is in context, and that's been sufficient to get myself to the top of the rankings in a very competitive keyword market (well I'm guessing "Paralympics" is an important keyword at the mo'?).

Anyway, in case you're a person trying to find a Paralympic Medal table, and have no interest in my ramblings about ColdFusion (and SEO...), then here's an extended table:

This one includes all the countries from my reader-base, rather than just the top ten.  But it's still ordered by medals/population, and New Zealand is still doing pretty well.  Which is what I was actually trying to promote in all this medal table shenanigans... ;-)

Pōmārie.

--
Adam