If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed 
As with all kinds of business, a great way to learn SEO is by doing case studies. It’s also a good idea to keep an eye on your competition but sometimes it’s a good thing to look at something fresh, do a little benchmarking which isn’t based on something you see or do everyday. So I’ve chosen Valentine’s Day, since it’s a special occasion today, and I’d like to wish you all a happy day with your loved ones.
Let’s see what happens. I did a simple Google search for Valentine’s day on google and met the following main results:
These are the top three results. We can see that the first is wikipedia which can technically not be beat and it’s only normal to be so. Also, we can clearly see that this is a research keyword since I for one have not got any ads. SEOs have obviously optimized those pages for more specific keywords but let’s see what we get.
wikipedia is first. i’ve done the search for “valentines day” since it’s more likely people will search for this rather than “valentine’s day”. As a result Google has not highlighted a great part of the url but has recognised the title and text as my keyword. A reason for this would be that some people have linked to it using valentines day as a keyword. The title is Valentine’s Day - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia which is a good thing for SEO since the keyword has a high density and is to the front of the title, which also gives it a lot more importance. Strangely I cannot find any description for the page but the keywords section is interesting: Valentine’s Day,Protection policy,Citation needed,Citing sources,Reliable sources,Verifiability,Articles with unsourced statements since March 2007,Articles with unsourced statements since February 2008,Articles needing additional references from February 2008,Valentine’s Day,1381. Again, the keyword is right at the front, and the rest are strange keywords, except the last few which are Valentine’s Day again and 1381 which is a very niched keyword, since there will not be many people searching for it. It’s an interesting tactic but the other keywords are strange to say the least. Perhaps to convince Google that it’s not too targeted. A very very interesting seo tactic has been to use <body class=”mediawiki ns-0 ltr page-Valentine_s_Day”>, hiding the keyword in the css class. Also, the very first thing in the html is an H1 title, Valentine’s Day. Otherwise except the title hacks, there’s not much here. The main reason of its position is of course the famous wikipedia PR8.
On to the next site, histoy.com. This is again a rather important reference site which contains all the instances of the keyword. However, the title is targeted for the specific keyword “history of valentine’s day” , which means our keyword is further along in the title, making it less important. A very annoying usability issue with the website is the fact that there is an autoplay video which is quite annoying. It does have a description which is: “Learn the history of Valentine’s Day, send free ecards, get dating tips, a Valentine’s Day survival guide, find romantic movies and more at History.com.” which is not so well optimized since the keyword is not first and there are unrelated keywords (so and so). A nice touch is coding ‘ as ‘ to make it readable by browsers which may interpret it incorrectly. This is almost all on-page optimization, except for nice links on the left which are many and properly optimized. And of course the PR factor… A very tasteful thing is that when the video is over you get left with a beautiful image of roses. Nice touch.
I won’t go into the third result since it is Valentine’s Day and my sweet Valentine is coming by so I’ll let you look at result number three. Off the bat title’s the same as the wiki and basically it has a few more tricks I’ll let you discover for yourselves.
That’s it for this case study. To close this off, here’s a pretty Google Trends link to play with http://www.google.com/trends?q=valentines+day&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0. Also, for any questions feel free to drop an email to contact@eydryan.com and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, since things are busy around here lately.
February 26th, 2008 at 6:45 am
I found your blog via Google while searching for black dating advice and your post regarding s day | eydryan looks very interesting to me. I was impressed by your site and offerings. I was looking at some of the articles and it really impressed me. All I can say is congratulations on creating this site and what took you so long? I look forward to returning.