Welcome Olympics fans! Although my morning news feeds give me Olympic stories, they aren’t very succinct about communicating the current medal count, or telling me the when and where of the sports I’m interested in. I usually have to dig through stories to find what I need. So I end up using the search engines instead. This morning I searched for “Olympics results” and the top organic result was a list of “News Results”. There were three listed:
1) Offshoreinsiders.com
2) Offshoreinsiders.com
3) Times Asia
You might wonder why you are not familiar with such a well-optimized news source as Offshoreinsiders.com. You’re a reasonably well-traveled and well-informed person, right? How could this august news source have gone undetected until now? Because it’s an offshore gambling site that has delivered all the right “triggers” to appear in the top of organic search results for news.
By “triggers” I mean highly relevant, viral content. Offshoreinsiders.com is the most popular gambling site for gambling bloggers who have rewarded the site with links. While this is not a typical result for “news”, the overwhelming number of gambling blogs that reference this website, alongside proper on-page optimization, allows this website to appear at the top of news results for the Olympics.
Some might think this is sad, but there’s a lesson here.
As you can imagine, there are hundreds of other news sources that would pay a lot of money to appear in the top of organic search results for Olympic keywords. Businesses like nbcolympics.com, huffingtonpost.com, vancouver2010.com, espn.com, cnn.com and every other media company around the world. How does an offshore gambling site win the organic search contest over all these other intelligent and well-funded companies? It appears they have integrated search engine best practices into their marketing model.
Just like Olympic athletes, if you want to appear higher in organic search results, you must train in advance for the race. Your content must be highly relevant and you must use content-formatting techniques (microformats), social media link juice, high page-rank links and user experience criteria that must be reconciled with business strategy to win this game. There are millions of views, and millions of dollars at stake.
If you have a big event coming up in 2010, don’t gamble. Make sure you’ve aligned your business goals with search engine optimization best practices well in advance to ensure you’ll be standing on the middle platform when the gold is handed out.