Predictive SEO
Posted on December 14th, 2005by Michael Gray in SEO
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Many moons ago I was a draftsman/CAD (Computer Aided Design) operator for an HVAC (Heating Ventilating and Air Conditioning) engineering firm, or in regular language I drew blueprints for heating and cooling systems in home and buildings. Since w dealt with building engineers on a regular basis I learned a few things along the way. One was the concept of Predictive Maintenance. Basically the engineer kept a log book of all of the repairs he did. The engineer would then use this log to determine patterns for maintenance. For example if a particular pump need to be serviced every 18 months, on month 17 he would take the pump out and fix it before it need to be serviced.
Now my head is a jumble of ideas, and I feel that cross pollination is a good thing, so I use a practice I call Predictive SEO. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. Right now there are 30 teams in professional major league baseball. As long as there is a world series in 2006 we can be extremely certain one of those 30 teams will win the world series. So how does an SEO use this to their advantage, by setting up 30 page slugs. For example build pages like this: New York Yankees 2007 World Series Champions, New York Mets 2007 World Series Champion and so on.
I wouldn’t put links to these pages in a prominent spot, but I would put them on a doorway mini site map page to make sure they get spidered. The farthest out I would go is 12 months before the event, but 6 to 9 months is a little more realistic. The goal here is to give the search engine spiders enough time to work their way down into your pages. Now don’t be a complete knucklehead and put up blank pages, put up a paragraph or two of relevant content. One of the great things about baseball is near the end of the season they start saying which teams have no chance of mathematically making it to the world series. At that time I would start dropping those other pages (tip recycle them for 2007). If everything works properly you’ll have complete fully indexed pages that rank when the event happens while other people re rushing to produce content. Using this tactic you can get a leg up over more authoritative but less aggressive web publishers, you may also garner some first mover advantages.
While my example was about baseball you can apply this to almost any subject matter. What you need is a small or manageable number of end results that occur on a predetermined event. For example you know when a new TV show or Movie is going to come out, you know when a celebrity is going to get married (maybe), you know the names of hurricanes for 2006 and 2007, you know spring fashions are going to change in 2006, the list is endless …
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December 14th, 2005 at 7:14 pm
Rather cool idea. I gave it a few minutes of coding, I’ll keep you informed on how it’s doing
December 14th, 2005 at 8:41 pm
Ah yes, I see your have caught the Predictive Markets buzz. Very intersting stuff.
December 15th, 2005 at 9:07 am
This is fantastic. *Mind begins to wander*
December 24th, 2005 at 3:18 pm
Cool Idea ,Another best example would be to create pages for ” sex scandal” or ” sex tape” type kws…If ever that happen you would be blessed with a truk load of traffic! - offcourse the only way to monetize that traffic is with spyware downloads
November 23rd, 2006 at 10:13 am
Interesting idea, Michael.
I know a friend of mine had a movie review site - he would do that constantly with upcoming movies - he would prepare ’story blanks’ for events like the box office sales for the first weekend, fully written up, and then just add the numbers when they came out. That way he was already ranking for ‘ sales’ and other similar searches on the opening weekend.