Coolest Guy on the Planet

coolest guy on the planet: who's who in the SEO wacky races for pole position

There's been a race going on for a couple of years now to decide which SEO owns first place in the SERPS for Coolest Guy on the Planet and its probably not news to most people in the SEO industry that Brad Fallon has been there for quite some time. Anyway, let's have a look at the run down of who's competing to be The Coolest Guy on the Planet. I've been pretty general in my analysis here, just a quick look at Google Web, SEO for Firefox and a quick glance back end, so I haven't looked in any detail at link relevancy, who's linking in, keyword spread, or many of the more nuanced high-hitting techniques I could have done with world enough and time. As a final caveat, links showing on SEO 4 Firefox seem to have been as erratic as hell for the past week or so; apologies in advance if these figures are wildly out.

So who is the alpha SEO on Google Web ?

1. & 2: Brad Fallon holds the first 2 places with around 13000 links going to his homepage which gets the top result. According to Brad's website he fell off the face of the planet for this phrase for a little while and then shot back in at numero uno again. Anyway, seems like Brad has held this position just about forever. 1st coolest guy on the planet
   



2. It's Brad Fallon too. 2nd coolest guy on the planet



3. Jonathon Leger gets in 3rd place behind Brad with only 600 links pointing at the entire site, goes in there using mainly basic white hat techniques that are open to anyone, and claims to do it to the letter of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. There's a lesson in there for all of us. If you tack into the wind rather than against it, the going is always easier. 3rd coolest guy on the planet



4. Using not much more than the title tag, a couple of h1 tags, an h2 tag, meta desc and 6000 odd inbound links Russell Brunson comes in at number 4. Nice job (close the chevron on the meta description tag though). Russ also takes no, 1 spot for coolest guy on the Plant, which is cool in its own way. 4th coolest guy on the planet



5. Mike Filsaime comes in at number 5 for coolest guy on the Planet. This guy is not an SEO, but a mate of Brad Fallon's who wanted to get in on the action. Well done Mike. With only around 90 inbound links obtained through article submission, the perfect domain name (a babe at two years old) and keywords sprinkled through the page nested in good semantic markup this is a really respectable job. 5th coolest guy on the planet



6. While aiming to be 3rd Coolest Guy On The Planet, Garrett Boon inadvertantly comes in at no 6 for the coolest guy on the planet, which is fairly cool. Garrett has about 200 inbound links to that webpage; although I notice a PR0 which just goes to show how much PR matters. Apparently, Skystrider is a character from World of WarCraft and not some sort of SEO software as I first assumed. 6th coolest guy on the planet



7. With a PR5 and 2300 inbound links to this webpage no 7 only needs to tighten up his onsite optimisation in order to become a much fiercer competitor for cool; as he admits himself. With some attention to meta data and some more strategic use of semantic markup we could have a contender here - I'd suggest taking 'July 28, 2007' out of H2 tags and maybe putting, ummmm, the coolest guy on the planet in there once or twice (just a bit of editing blog source code needed here). 7th coolest guy on the planet



8. At No 8 Peter Drew is in here to prove a point. Jonathon went in with White Hat and Peter decided to don a Black Hat for this project to see how he would do by comparison. Peter's BH shinnanigans look to have got him 35,000 inbound links to his blog, but its hard to be sure with BlogSpot. 8th coolest guy on the planet



9. James Schramko treated this one as a project and outlines a cohesive project plan for getting where he got. With around 400 inbounds landing on this page, James too only needs to step on the gas with the onsite relevancy to get some extra edge. More semantic markup, and less content nested in div tags and we may see some movement. 9th coolest guy on the planet



10. Patrick holds 10th place with around 200 links pointing at him and a domain that's been around 2 years. There's a few coding probs in here that need fixing such as h2 tags nested in p tags, unclosed p tags and non-breaking spaces nested in h3 tags. I'd clean these up and see what happens. I'm having trouble myself solving a p tag nesting issue with BlogSpot at the moment - whatever I do a bloody superfluous p tag creeps back in and nests my entire content. 10th coolest guy on the planet

So what do most of these cool guys share in common - well a few of these coolest guy contenders have some pretty dodgy photos. Okay so in my photo I'm hiding behind shades and look like I've just emerged from the bushes after an illicit laison with a squirrel, but really.

So who is really the coolest guy on the planet, is this just SEO testosterone, shameless self-promotion, is this just a case of all us SEO sperm competing to get into Google's golden egg, or is there a serious point? Well of course there is. When SEOs come head to head like this and pitt their strengths against each other it really sets the benchmark for the calibre of companies that will work with them, the fees they are worth and their prestige within the industry. It doesn't really matter whether they are competing over the phrase the coolest guy on the planet or who can fit the most frozen peas down their shorts. Ok so there is some implicit kudos loaded into the term coolest guy on the planet. But its also a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun aswell; there's nothing really cool about being cool these days and SEOs have to be able to laugh at themselves in order to prove to the outside world that we are not an esoteric bunch of juju vendors who belong to some sort of exclusive mystical coven of Inter-nerd warlocks. And even more importantly, to prove that we do not take ourselves too seriously.

I might be tempted to go for silliest sod on the planet' or daftest bugger on the planet. Maybe I should even go for the most flatulent guy on the planet. I wasn't nicknamed the Phantom Farter at school for nothing.

Anyway, enough for today. I've just put out my billionth cigarette of the day, I smell like a skunk-mayonaisse sandwich and I'm going to dive in the bath.

So who is the coolest guy on the planet right now?

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SEO Afterword

10/12/2007: As a result of this post I did inadvertently end up being Google's no. 1 'most flatulent guy on the planet'. Well some people use link bait, whereas I seem to have just introduced stink bait to online marketng.