Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

How to AMAZE Your Clients With a KILLER Viral Campaign by SEO Bomb Blog
is a great study in how to get fast results for an SEO client. Though partnering with SEO blackhat, they use totally legit methods to create buzz and improve all aspects of the business and their web presence. Wow. Check out the results (I pasted more than I meant to becasue the results didn’t make sense sans context):

Now, as QuadZilla pointed out, my plan had several good points in it, but what was lacking was the one thing that would make this exceptionally remarkable.

The one thing that would make every single designer and Mac fan-boy go Ga-Ga:

Enter The Prizes
Week 1: iPod nano 2GB & iPod 30GB
Week 2: MacBook
Week 3: MacBook Pro
Week 4: Mac Pro with DUAL 30″ Cinema HD LCDs
See where we’re going at? Good.

But there’s one more thing missing: The seeders - and boy did we get seeders.

In addition to the link from Apple.com and the judges from About.com, 456Bereastreet, Mac Addict Magazine and 9Rules.com, you can view the full list of judges right here.

That, dear readers, is some serious link juice.

Crestock.com got 200,000 unique users from the contest, went on Digg, doubled their average daily traffic after the contest, got over 5000 new customers and increased their organic search engine traffic by 1258% - in one month!

SEW’s “Weather.com’s SEO Efforts Rest Heavily on Analytics” does a good job descibing the thought process behind optimising for a keyword. I like the talk about selling the project internally as well. This is a good article for SEW… I want to boycott them for dissing Sullivan but if the content is valuable…????

Stay Master Of Your Feed Domain describes how to use feedburner to track your blog feed. I think it’s way worth it. It’s very hard to tell who is syndicating your content otherwise. That said, a drawback to feedburner is that people subscribe to your RSS using a feedburner owned domain. No big deal, but if feedburner goes under or changes hands or if something better comes along, you’ll need to convince all your subscribes to go through the onerous process of changing their aggregator settings. It’d be way better to just control that url, which feedburner allows you to do for $3 / month.

UPDATE 2/12/07

Alternatively, you could follow these instructions:
http://www.roguewolves.com/drupal-and-feedburner

It shows a very easy way to use your .htaccess file to effectivly mask the feedburner URL as your own. Good stuff.