Global Warming Awareness Blog

by Laura Thieme

Hello everyone.  Most of you know me from Bizresearch and the search engine marketing industry.  If you read my blog on that site regarding my environmental to-do list for 2007, you’ll see my new interest in global warming and continued interest in orphanages and children.  It resulted from watching Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth and reading the book, as well as watching PBS’ special on Emperor Penguins.  That combined with a month off of work from surgery I had in late December created a new desire to do more with the environment. 

I have never considered myself an environmentalist, however, those who know me well are very aware of my passion for animals.  Almost any animal is a target for saving.  I think the cat community has long been aware of my “sucker” position in life, as they have always known where to go for shelter and food.  I’ll never forget the guy who lived next to me in college.  He brought me a cat and suggested I take it indoors.  I said I had no room for one more.  I owned two cats at that point, and a dog.  When I refused to take this white cat indoors, he asked me what would one more be?  Why not? I had a small zoo, he mused.

But cats in my neighborhood could always find a sympathetic heart willing to feed it water and food if they came across my doormat.  I’ve had two cats and blogged about one of them in particular, Misha, over the past year.  I’ve blogged about the penguins on another blog of mine.  So, if I see an animal suffering for any reason, whether it has to do with global warming or not, then I’m interested in what I can do to help.

Animals are often helpless, depending on the environment they’re in.  If they’re indoor animals and then left to fend for themselves, it’s easy to want to help those left out on the street.  If they’re wild animals and in need of assistance, like my little cat Monroe before he was adopted by my dog Cody, or the robins during winter in Columbus, Ohio, or the penguins in Antarctica, then I’m always interested in learning more about helping them.

If humans are hurting the environment, and therefore hurting animals in ways that could have a significant impact on the ecosystem, then I’m interested in learning more and spreading the word to encourage change.

In addition, I was thrilled to see that our SEO World Championship this year is for the keyword phrase “global warming awareness”.   While the top ranked Google sites are nothing more than content fodder, which Google has given preference to, I’m going to go about things white-hat and see if I can rank without generating content that is nothing more than a few scripts saying the same things over and over.  I’ve also noted that the top ranked site right now is a keyword embedded domain name.  The real problem I have with this championship is that I’m a stickler for typos and to have to try to rank for “globalwarming” as one word, and “awareness2007″ as another word is a killer for me.

What this shows is that we’re willing to rank for something that is not really genuine stuff, and creating so much content which could likely become garbage just to rank for a World Championship prize.  So, I’m of course, interested in ranking for something that is more likely, which is global warming awareness in 2007.  The question is can I rank for the less popular search term without spelling things like that all over my blog?

So my focus here will be what I’m personally passionate about and if I rank at the same time for a keyword phrase that wins some prize, cool.  Otherwise, I plan to actually focus on the topic at hand, which is far more important than winning any prize.

Laura Thieme

UPDATE ON MARCH 25, 2007:

I’m ranked in MSN for “global warming awareness blog” in the top five search engine listings.  I’m not ranked at all in Google for this.  I’m not ranked yet for “global warming awareness 2007″, probably due to lack of optimization for this number or word.  I’m not shooting for the misspelling.  Just can’t do it.  But I’m going to determine how long it takes to rank in each search engine for related phrases on content versus links.

UPDATE: APRIL 18, 2007
I’m ranked top ten in Google for “global warming awareness blog” as of today.   I’m ranked top 20 in Yahoo for the same keyword phrase.  I checked “global warming awareness” in Google - I’m not yet top 100.  I also checked MSN - no such luck there yet either.