The Coolest Guy in the World

I just found this video at ColledgeHumor from a Google search and thought ..... I have to get a post up about this vid. This guy isn't just a great skater, he seems to be the coolest at every trick in the book.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

I decided to run a test. The results may surprise you.

The below graph is a screenshot in Alexa of the top two results for the natural Google search term of "Coolest Guy in the World". Number one is my arch-nemesis "Brad Fallon" (nah, not really, he is a really cool guy and well deserved of that number one spot). The second was the CollegeHumor website with the awesome video.

While Brads site generates high traffic it is barely a blip on the radar (that slight bump between Oct 12 and Oct 19) in comparison to CollegeHumor.

It just goes to show, you don't need massive traffic to be the number one on Google for your given search terms. You just need grab a good SEO book and build up a growing list of backlinks. Relevance will beat high traffic any day.

I know it's a bit like comparing apples from oranges as most of the traffic from CollegeHumor comes from many different sources. e.g. coming from a completely unrelated link and finding the video from the site.

But what would be more beneficial to your site? Higher rankings in the search engines or more actual traffic? For example, what if I was to leave a comment under the Coolest guy in the World video saying "That was awesome! Kind of reminds me of this video ** insert obvious link to my own site with embedded YouTube clip here **".

That comment could potentially send thousands of new visitors from a high traffic site to your own.

All is fair in love and Search Engine Optimization, so find that balance of getting to the top of Google (plus the other search engines) AND getting the traffic to your site from other sources.

Remember, you may be number one on Google today but you may not be there tomorrow ;)