Smackdown! Daniel Hope vs. Daniel Hope

July 14th, 2009 · No Comments

I wrote recently about the use of Bing in its past tense, inspired by a hilarious and fateful conversation Scotty Iseri had with his boss. I have been trying Bing out a bit lately and have been impressed with its search results.

The Vanity Folder

One thing I teach my students is to set up a vanity folder in their RSS reader. This is a folder where you unapologetically subscribe to all things pertaining only to you (your name, your company, etc.). In this folder I tell people to include Google Alerts and other search engine results. Getting Google Alerts via RSS is a little tricky but this tutorial should make it easy.

Practicing what I preach, I performed a quick search for Daniel Hope on Bing:

Just as I expected, the top spot is taken by violinist Daniel Hope. Daniel Hope is a British musician who grew up hanging out with Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar. He has even jammed with The Police on his 239 year old instrument (purchased from Menuhin on a 15 year note). Judging by fame and talent alone, the UK’s Daniel Hope deserves the front page in any search engine’s results.

But look here at the #3 spot:

Who is this impostor Daniel Hope talking about LOLcats? Oh wait . . . that’s me! The Daniel Hope who began writing under the pseudonym Tracksuit CEO; whose true identity was probably one of the worst kept secrets in the history of anonymity.

When I began blogging in June of 2007, the violinist Daniel Hope dominated the first pages of Google, Yahoo! and all the other search engines. But my current place in the search engine results is a testament to the SEO power of the blog.

Here are the steps I took:

Started a blog (the original was a free blog on WordPress)
Posted original content (and kept it current)
Encouraged conversation (comments, links, etc.)
Posted my blog links to Social Networks (Digg, Delicious, etc.)

These are powerful steps and can be applied universally to any blog in any industry. So while the violinist Daniel Hope was busy practicing his arpeggios, the blogger Daniel Hope was busy practicing his linkbaiting.

Speaking of linkbaiting, the title of this post mentions a smackdown. This may be a bit sensational; no suplexes were dealt and no atomic elbows were dropped, but it does make for a great title. And anyone who has practiced the dark art of linkbaiting knows that each campaign’s success hinges on a great title.

If I ever do have the singular pleasure of meeting the other Daniel Hope, I hope we can both agree that the Internet is big enough for the two of us. If not, I think we should meet on neutral territory; settling our differences with a dance-off.

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