What do you do if you are a known search engine marketer who doesn’t shy away from ruffling feathers of the search engine optimization community and said community decides to have a competition in your name in an effort to disprove some of the claims you’ve made?
Well, if you are Dave Pasternack, you engage these combatants on their own ground and try to beat them at their own game… something that seems to be working for the controversial President of Dit-it Marketing.
As pointed out by IncrediBILL over at his fiendishly named blog – Dave Pasternack News and IncrediBILL’s Random Rants – Pasternack is in a position to win the competition designed to point out the errors in his thinking. Currently, the Dave Pasternack about me page (more on this in a moment) from Did-it.com is number 2 in the Google rankings Google+Search”>for the same keyphrase.
When Threadwatch’s competition first kicked off, Pasternack’s about me wasn’t even on the front page of these same Google results. With that in mind, the question becomes, how did Pasternack effect such a change in Google’s results?
The major alteration was done when Pasternack (or the Did-it webmaster) developed a new about me page that improved the keyword content while making minor but noticeable changes to the page’s title tags. The Did-It index page also features a “Dave Pasternack” link that points to the new and improved about me page (view the old one).
What I’m curious about is do Pasternack’s relatively minor changes help prove his thesis about SEO not being rocket-science? If you can improve your search position that drastically by simply changing some text, title tags and by adding one backlink (MSN is the only engine to list a substantial backlink count; Yahoo shows 88 and Google shows their standard goose egg), it makes you wonder just how hard the SEO exercise really is…
Of course, Dave Pasternack is not the most competitive keyword phrase in the world, either.
