Why Posting about the Oscars Today is 2 weeks to Late

This morning as I do the rounds of some of my favorite blogs I’ve noticed a theme. Its the Academy Awards – the Oscars. I wonder how many blogs are listing the winners of the 2005 Oscars today – I’ve just seen at least 10.

As I surfed around and saw these entries I asked myself – ‘why are they posting these posts today?’

Ok – most people are posting the Oscar results out of a genuine interest in the Oscars – however I suspect some are doing it because they think people are searching for the information today. I’ve got news for them – you’re two weeks too late with your post.

Why? Well to put it simply – if you are blogging about an event and you want people to find your post via Google or one of the other search engines you need to anticipate what people are searching for in advance and put up a post about it early. Here is what I would have done if I’d have wanted big hits yesterday and today from people searching for the results.

1. At least two weeks ago I would write a post titled ‘2005 Academy Awards Winners and Results’ (I’d probably do a second one also titled ‘2005 Oscars Winners and Results’).
2. I’d make these posts keyword rich – ie they should have the words Academy Awards, Oscars, Winners, Movies, Results etc – numerous times throughout the post
3. I’d include an introduction to the Oscars with the date and time to the ceremony and also include a list of all the nominations for the main categories.
4. I’d link to these posts from other parts of my blogs to make sure the Search Engine’s bots found them.
5. I’d sit back and let the Search Engines do their job – in the mean time I’d optimize the ads and affiliate programs on those pages.
6. On the day of the Oscars I’d start adding the winners and results live as they happened.

This strategy would mean that when readers head to the Search Engines and type in ‘Oscars winners’ or ‘Academy Awards Results’ – they would find my post/s fairly high up (if not at the top) of the results page. When they came across to my page they would see the most up to date results.

Its not rocket science – I used this strategy with virtually every event in the Athens Olympics, with the presidential election last year, with reality TV results and with numerous other sporting events. It works. Of course it helps if the blog you’re doing it with has a reasonable page ranking to start with – but even when I first started out a couple of years ago it worked.