SEO Challenge : Neil Patel Increases Jason Calacanis Search Traffic by 21%

March 26th, 2007 by Loren Baker, Editor | 2 Comments

Finally some positive spin on the practice of search engine optimization has come from Calacanis.com, but not from the potty-mouth of Jason, who had this to say about SEO:

90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman. These are guys in really bad suits trying to get really naive people to sign long-term contracts. These clients typically make horrible products and don’t deserve traffic–that’s why they’re not getting it organically so they hire the slimebuckets to game the system for them.

Neil Patel of Pronet Advertising (who also helped with SEJ’s SEO); social media and SEO expert, challenged Calacanis that ethical SEO could substancially increase his blog’s search engine traffic, by a minimum of 20% after 30 days.

Neil put together blog SEO recommendations and handed them to the Weblogs, Inc. team, who have only implemented 10% of those recommendations to date.

Currently SEO changes are still being made and around 10% of them have been made so far which has resulted in 7,449 search engine visitors between March 14th and March 19th. This proves that there was a 21.14% increase in search traffic which is shown in the picture below.

So, Neil’s SEO of Calacanis.com has resulted in a very positive increase in search engine traffic, and if Calacanis.com is totally optimized to Neil’s liking by the Weblogs Inc. people, Neil estimates a 50% increase in search traffic.

Given that Calacanis.com is a very niche industry oriented personal blog, Jason does not get a lot of search traffic to begin with.

I do wonder however, how beneficial it would be for the Weblogs Inc. team to implement these SEO recommendations across the board on their major blogs such as Engadget, Joystiq and Autoblog… and what an increase of 20%-50% in search traffic will mean to their bottom line, and that of AOL (and whether Pronet Advertising will get that SEO contract!).

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2 responses so far ↓

Andy Beard on Mar 27, 2007 at 2:19 am

The other Weblogs blogs are actually fairly well SEOed by traditional standards, but not based on what is possible analysing things like the recently revealed Google BlogSearch patent.

They don’t use tagging extensively but they do use a lot of categories.
mike k. on Mar 27, 2007 at 6:55 pm

i’d be curious to know what the benchmark starting point was for the seo challenge campaign. in other words, how much seo work had j. calcanis done to begin with? if it was none, then any seo techniques done by a smart person would create a spike, right? if calcanis had already done a ton of stuff and had seo programs in place, then the spike is even more noteworthy. i’m not a skeptic, just a learner and think it might be a relevant question.