Well it appears I am going to have to concede defeat on this napkin pirates challenge. I learned so much that my head is spinning. The best I could do was my napkin pirates Twitter page. It appears to be #3 right now, so it is close, but not close enough.

I will try to provide some feedback in the coming weeks for anyone who is interested. Thanks for following along.

Have you ever noticed how well PDFs tend to rank for some specific targeted terms? Well I have. As many of my regular readers know, I am in the middle of an SEO contest right now so I thought I would see how well I could get a PDF to rank.

We will give it a little dash of link juice from KansasCitySEO.com by mentioning the sweet new napkin pirates PDF that I found on ScoutTechnology.com.

Go ahead and take a look at the file. Notice I have it saved in a directory called napkin-pirates. The file has a name with “napkin pirates” in the prominent starting position. If you download the file and take a closer look you will see napkin pirates mentioned in the title, author, subject, and keywords fields. The file resides on a domain with good PageRank.

Looks like this file should rank. Now it is time for the famous wait and see game. We will see how it goes.

As many of you have already seen, I am in the middle of an SEO challenge on the term “napkin pirates”. This particular post is a test at the success of header tags in the boosting of rankings. Let’s begin.

Napkin Pirates and Header Tags

<-- Our H1 tag with a nice generic napkin pirates title.

Napkin Pirates Favorite Things

<-- An H2 tag in all its glory.

• Napkins
• Pirates

Napkin Pirates Disclaimer

<-- We would be remiss to overlook the H3 tag, so here it is.
There were no napkin pirates harmed in the writing of this post. It was simply an exercise in SEO and a test in the effectiveness of header tags on the ranking of a napkin pirates page.

No Comments

---

Napkin Pirates

The Kansas City SEO Club has thrown down a challenge and I’ve gone “all in”. We have decided to have an SEO challenge and see who can rank the best and the most often for the phrase “napkin pirates” in Google on March 31, 2008. Well naturally I have to take advantage of the asset that is the Kansas City SEO blog.

Here’s what I have done so far. This is a lie of course. It’s not all I’ve done, but I need the links.

• I figure this blog post has the chance to rank.
• I have another blog post about the napkin pirates challenge on my Smokin’ Sevens website.
• I have a new website in place where I am going to sell to napkin pirates. I am going to see if I can get that baby to rank inside of 30 days. That could be a challenge. Any of you readers who are kind enough to throw a link my way to www.themedpartysupplies.com, I certainly appreciate it.

Updates:

• Here is a napkin pirate-related post on NameBait.com. Thank you to NameBait.com for covering this challenge. Those guys over there are great!
• There is a great napkin pirates question posted by some genius on Yahoo! Answers. We will see how well that thing ranks.
• The new napkin pirates Squidoo page. Check it!
• A napkin pirates Twitter page. Will it rank?!
• I just read a great new Wiki How about napkin pirates. Check it out if you get a minute.
• Sweet new napkin pirates gathering place on Gather.com.
• Awesome napkin pirates images on Flickr!

There will, of course, be more to come. Please check back often.

I just mentioned this on my NameBait blog, but I want to post it here as well so you readers have the same information.

As much as I hate to do it, I have decided to sell MySpaceLayoutDirectory.com. It is currently listed on SitePoint, so give it a look if you are interested.

The auction is over. The site is still mine. It was an interesting learning process. I recommend you all try it.

This should be the start of several announcements on this blog concerning some development projects that I currently have underway. I have developed a new website for people to find information about shopping in Kansas City. The site was built on the WordPress platform and includes several WordPress SEO plugins. Be sure to dig through the code and see what you can find.

Bear with me while the development continues and please feel free to leave me comments here or on the new Kansas City shopping website.

You can find the site by following one of the two links above or by directly navigating to ShoppingKansasCity.com.

Just as an FYI, my domaining site (NameBait.com) has finally started reporting a Google PageRank (2). The website came online October 8, 2008 and today is the first day I have noticed the PageRank. It is three months later.

Just a note, although I have not had a PageRank on NameBait.com up until today Google has still crawled the site several times each day.

I wrote another post on NameBait.com that gives a couple examples as to what I am seeing with the weight domain names appear to be providing now in the Google SERPs. There is no need to repeat the post over here, so drop over there and take a look if you are interested.

Someone wrote an excellent blog post over at NameBait.com regarding the weight that domain names appear to be adding to a website’s search engine rankings. You may want to run over there and take a look!

It is no wonder Yahoo is the number two search engine in the world. Early in October I started a new website called NameBait.com. The purpose of this new site is to cover the world of domain names and my fascination with it.

I run a WordPress blog on that site and have set it up to generate and update an XML site map automatically with each new post. Once the site map has been updated, each of the major three search engines is pinged to let them know of the update. Google drops by within minutes, if not seconds, to take a look at the new site map and to index the new page(s). Yahoo on the other hand may go several days without stopping by.

I am aware of the whole sandbox concept and understand that we are talking about a brand new site. Keep in mind though that the sandbox is typically attributed to Google and yet they make the best effort to check out the new content. Thank you Google. It is clear to me why you are the number one search engine.

I will say one nice thing about Yahoo even though it is more of a backhanded compliment. Yahoo has at least come by the site. Even though they are always way behind Google, at least they still play in the game. MSN and Ask have not even been by yet this month (November). Nice work guys. Now I am not saying I have great content or that what I write is groundbreaking earthshattering stuff, but it is interesting that you can see why some companies lead and others follow. All that just by checking log files.