Thread: Rankmaniac college competition

Hi, we're Caltech students in a computer science class called "Ideas Behind the Web." Our assignment is to create a webpage which will rank highly on Google or Bing for the search query "rankmaniac 2010" or "rankmaniac" (without quotes). Essentially our professor wants us to spam the internet! We’re also competing with a class at CMU. Help us beat CMU by linking to us!

Our site is:
[URL="http://2010rankmaniac.blogspot.com"]Rankmaniac 2010[/URL]

Our site recently went from page 9 of the Google results to the first page, but we’d appreciate any advice or tips you could give us to get us to #1. We’re using Google Webmaster to track our site. We seem to not be even indexed on Bing.

Thanks!
Rankmaniacs

Hi Rankmaniacs,

firstly welcome to seoforums.org - and I guess welcome to the world of search engine optimization as well!

Your challenge (already accepted I guess) is to rank #1 for your chosen search term.

The constituent elements that you need to get right are:

1) full on site optimization of your pages to match the keyword terms being targetted.
2) on site optimization of the content around the keyword terms, and site architecture. make sure you are writing compelling, real content as well. maybe 15-20 pages of it. Make sure that your onsite link anchor text is highly relevant to the keywords you are targetting.
3) make sure your site is well optimized for speed (mind you, hosting on blogspot means there isnt much you can do on that I guess)

4) (and this is the biggie) [B]GET LINKS... LOTS OF LINKS.... GOOD LINKS!!![/B]
so, if you can get links of anyone who has a section of the caltech website at their disposal, get a link somewhere on their pages pointing at your site, if you have friends/parents/anyone you know with a website, get THEM to link to you as well. If you can write a handy widget, then get a link in that and try and get it out there to go viral... the possibilities are truly endless for the linkbuilding bit...

If you have ANY specific questions, please feel free, shout out, we are here to help!!