Ted Leonsis’ Blog/SEO Strategy to Earn Web 2.0 Street Cred
Today's Washington Post has an article ("For Ted Leonsis, a Quest to Find Himself Faster Online") on Ted Leonsis, vice chairman of AOL and owner of the Washington Capitals. It describes how he launched his personal blog, Ted's Take, initially in an effort to control the results in Google on a search of his name (previously, results were "a hodgepodge of news stories"). It's an interesting summary of using a blog and an intuitive SEO strategy to establish a specific reputation online. Here are the steps Ted followed: 
With a Technorati rank of 12,390 as of today (compared to Cuban's 107), Ted clearly has some room to make his blog more popular. That said, since Ted's Take ranks #2 in Google search results for his name (behind AOL's corporate bio), Ted's primary objective has been achieved. Ted told the story of launching his blog at an ExecutiveBiz event last May, where he described his motivation as more based on his curiosity and general interest in how Google works than any elaborate personal marketing strategy. During that talk he also gave a great overview of Web 2.0 and how it fits in at AOL. You can watch the entire Ted Leonsis / ExecutiveBiz Web 2.0 event video here.
- Define the blog - he decided the blog would be both personal and professional, presumably to reach the widest audience.
- Write often - Ted notes that frequency of updates is an important ranking factor, and often posts several times per day.
- Link out - The article implies that outbound links help ranking, but that's primarily because they help ...
- ... Encourage Links In - By linking to other popular bloggers like fellow sports team owner Mark Cuban, Ted's earned links back to his blog, which both drives direct traffic and represents "votes of approval" in Google's indexing algorithm.
- Name drop - Ted hints that his keyword strategy is to use the names of the famous people he deals with regularly in his posts and tags, presumably so that searches on those names will return his blog. That's a challenging approach, though we've managed to make some good headway with a similar SEO strategy for ExecutiveBiz with their weekly "Executive Spotlight" feature.
With a Technorati rank of 12,390 as of today (compared to Cuban's 107), Ted clearly has some room to make his blog more popular. That said, since Ted's Take ranks #2 in Google search results for his name (behind AOL's corporate bio), Ted's primary objective has been achieved. Ted told the story of launching his blog at an ExecutiveBiz event last May, where he described his motivation as more based on his curiosity and general interest in how Google works than any elaborate personal marketing strategy. During that talk he also gave a great overview of Web 2.0 and how it fits in at AOL. You can watch the entire Ted Leonsis / ExecutiveBiz Web 2.0 event video here.
