coolest-guy-planet

Initially the site was set up to see how hard it is to compete for keywords “coolest guy on the planet”, in an area which is competed by some of the (allegedly) best SEO/Internet Marketing people on the planet. The first aim was to get to the first couple of pages of the search engine results pages (SERPS)  and try and get top 10 from there.

The site has hit No.1 position in Bing/Yahoo and hit No.2 in Google (Post Panda and Penguin algorithms) so the initial objective has been accomplished. Currently the onsite SEO is complete and offsite SEO can be improved with a lot more incoming quality links which is something I am not currently pursuing – time constraints!

Anyway I hope you find what you are looking for!

The site’s domain is now changed from coolestguyplanet.net to coolestguyplanettech.com

The Coolest Guy on the Planet is a competition, it is a silly SEO competition!,  but a competition none the less. So whats the big deal?

Is it a bunch of ego driven Alpha Males (and females for that matter) flexing their online muscles and declaring to the world just how cool they are and what they can teach you about search engine optimisation. Is it a measure of power in internet marketing circles to prove a point to see who is the best SEO guru? Or is it just a Internet Marketer hook into the potential customers to snag a fistful of online dollars typically ending in 97?

Well it’s all of the above and more.

There are many players, some old, some new, some into Internet Marketing and affiliate techniques that are guaranteed to bring you overnight riches and will buy you that million dollar mansion and get you off that dreaded 9-5 rat race treadmill, all you have to do is cough up an email address and eventually $97 and then some that just are doing it for the compete element and the glory.

My aim with this is purely for the glory, get into the top ten on Google, Bing and Yahoo for the keywords “coolest guy on the planet” by learning and applying key SEO principles and strategy – I have managed to get number one slots on Yahoo and Bing which rank sites similar, as Yahoo is transitioning to be fed the results by Bing, however these results do change all the time and I am currently switching positions in the top 10.

In Google I have only  made top 10 twice and that is a recent effort, currently sitting in No.9 spot, the new aim is to get to top 5 in Google for those infamous keywords

“coolest guy on the planet”

Effectively the keys words ‘coolest guy on the planet’ is a long tail search phrase, which means a phrase with multiple keywords rather than your standard one to two keywords. One to two keyword phrases are highly competitive and for new websites extremely difficult to compete with so a ‘long tail’ phrase keyword results can be more noticeable.

If the long tail phrase is identified and searched on by many searchers with low competition from websites, than success in the search results is an easier effort –  making it what is known as a niche market as nobody else has discovered that part of the market , if you can identify a niche market then you can do very well in organic search engine result pages aka ‘SERPS’. Doing well in SERPs is a good thing as over 60% of clicks occur in them as opposed to sponsored ads that appear at the top of the pages.

And if you can get to Number 1 in the SERPS, that position achieves 42% of clicks for the entire 10 positions shown on the same page.

So the trick is finding  a worthwhile long tail phrase with lots of people searching but not much competition  - one free tool to do the analysis is the Google Keyword Tool which is found inside the Adwords tool under the menu ‘Tools and Analysis” – 2 other options are WordTracker and Compete which offer a limited free option before you have to shell out a bit for the more comprehensive features – it’s always worthwhile cross referencing your data from a couple of tools.

The ‘coolest guy on the planet’ is by no means a successful niche market longtail  phrase, the current Global monthly search is 880 with low competition, whereas the term ‘search engine expert’ clocks in at 18,100 searches monthly with a moderate competitive level.

The competition allegedly started between Brad Fallon and Mike Filsaime at a Las Vegas strip joint after a couple of light ales, the domains where snapped up and the fun began – I don’t know how true that is but it has been around for a while as one of the competing domains coolestguyontheplanet.com is over 6 years old.

So if it’s a low volume, low competition how are you going to win – domain naming and age is a factor as well as highly optimised on/off page site optimisation coupled with backlinks and the amount of indexed content.

Google

In Google the outright leader is Jonathan Ledger and has been that way for a long time – the top 5 are as follows:

All of these domains are 5 years plus but Brad Fallons do not have the keywords in the title but he has the oldest domain with 10 years and also 2 targetted pages in the domain for the keywords

In terms of indexed content:

The content is not necessarily relevant to the keywords – how could you fit 870 pages filled with worthless information on coolest guys on the planet – the key content would occur on 1 to 2 pages.

And in terms of backlinks to the target page:

So even though Brad Fallon’s site has the numbers with the backlinks – those backlinks may be low quality and irrelevant, the key thing with links is to get links from similar types of sites to your content and to have the keyword anchor text in the link, Ledger’s site has less links but more links with the anchor text ‘coolest guy on the planet’ in fact there are 200 links with the same anchor text and if you also have content relevant copy thats how you win the race!

People are talking about search engines moving towards not using links as much to increase rankings with more of a reliance on original and relevant content coupled with a bunch of social media integration for their ranking algorithms but this is clearly not here yet as you can manipulate links to work in your favour.

SEO Moz interviewed 132 SEO brains in 2011 to see what they thought was being used for search engine rankings and they believe that 20% importance is given to links and another 20% importance is given to the authority of that domain that the link is coming from – so 40% importance on links. That’s a big % so a solid link building strategy is still a crucial thing to do to get to number 1.

But Google is striding towards content relevancy and quality – Google’s main aim is to deliver the right results to the searcher or else the searcher will go elsewhere. So how you work the SERPs in terms of SEO is constantly going to change. This is great for the searcher but keeps the SEO guru on his/her toes.

Bing

For Bing results for ‘coolest guy on the planet’ the top  5 are as follows:

Yahoo

For Yahoo results for ‘coolest guy on the planet’ the top  5 are as follows:

With Bing and Yahoo the interesting thing is that a couple of Ezine Articles and Squidoo Pages make high rank, the results are also similar from both search engines as Yahoo is transitioning being fed search results by Bing – the fact that the results are different from Google is good thing, but would be better if Bing gains more market share.

That’s it for now, I have nothing to sell, no opt-in box to fill out, no pop ups to appear in 1 minute – well until the traffic starts improving!

The site also serves as a reference for a bunch of how to? solutions for OSX, WordPress, Drupal and other stumbling tech blocks I have to hurdle and document, there is also a complementary “coolest guy on the planet” site done in Drupal but both share the same Google search in the menu – I document tech IT stuff because if  I don’t I’ll forget it and have to do the research again later, my brain has only 3 gigs and is constantly being overwritten – so if it also helps you in the process then I hope I am paying it forward!

Don’t worry I really don’t think that I am the coolest guy on the planet that’s why Steve Carells face is up there.

Could this be him?, is this the coolest guy on the planet??