I may not agree with the man’s politics at times, but I agree that its an awesome page.

I used CL’s CMS and built custom modules to populate the page. Some of those components query the database, and others are simply html code.

En un momento, ambos portales estuvieron inaccesibles. Y sin duda, este despliegue (al igual que el rediseño de eltiempo.com) tienen que ver con el hecho de que El Espectador reanudo tiraje diario y ha lanzado un portal web muy a la altura de la de El Tiempo (mejor?).

Evidentemente, el propósito era mostrar la noticia al tanto fue revelada por la fuerza pública. Pero no se si la estrategia fue la más adecuada; demuestra una mentalidad un poco anticuada el de eliminar el portal solo por subir la noticia a lo más alto de la primera página. En el caso de la web, reemplazaron dicha “primera página” cual lo harian en papel.

El Pais, de España, El New York Times, y Le Monde tuvieron una distribución más adecuada del despliegue de información.

I don’t think it’d be far fetched to understand why this story would be the number one search result, as it came from a very prominent source, with tons of visitors.

Enter: me. Now I don’t claim to be a SEO whiz, or to know how to game Google’s search rankings, or much else to know the secret sauce that make some pages stand out above others.

But there are some known tips and tweaks you can implement to get better rankings, and to achieve what the SEO acronym stands for: search engine optimization. Whether you land at the top of the list, or on the front page, is up to the web.

One of those tips is including the crux of your post (or page) in between <h1> tags. On a blogging platform like Wordpress, this is (almost always) automatically achieved by placing the keywords in the headline for your post.

For my entry on said attraction I decided to use the correct term (the tomahawk chopping cow), instead of oft-used, but incorrect, tomahawking cow, in the headline.

I still used tomahawking cow within the post just to get a few extra brownie points with Google and those searching for that particular term.

Notice that if you google those two terms, the actual YouTube page for my video shows up among the first results. That’s obviously inevitable, as more people will directly find the video on YouTube than to get to it via umpbump.com.

It’s worth mentioning another SEO trick: immediacy. The news of the THC Cow was announced a while back, and yet it was only revealed that very Friday I was at the Braves game. This, I swear, was pure coincidence, but I made the most out of it. I took my Canon Powershot digital still camera, and took some shaky, grainy video; pasted it together in iMovie on my Mac, and up it goes.

Because my post was picked up by Deadspin and Ballhype some time after it went up, it now sits at the top of the search results, and will probably stay there for a while.

Happy SEOing, ;)

P.S. There’s one more trick that I won’t mention, but that I’m using in this very post. And oh yea, the video: