something I said

I’m a bit surprised that I am the first one to say something about linking a specific phrase with a given website between now and next Tuesday night.

What I want to achieve will be obvious to many, so I am not going to spell it out in any detail, except to say how I arrived at this particular phrase. Initially it seemed that the phrase ‘Best UK blog’ might be appropriate because it is short and already widely used. But that latter quality may also keep it from appearing in search results.

So I considered a couple of other phrases and the number of results each brought in a search.

‘Best UK blog’ returned 19 million results;

‘Best UK blog 2008′ returned 46 million results;

‘Best British blog 2008′ returned 14 million results;

‘Best British blog contest 2008′ returned 425,000 results

‘Best blog UK contest 2008′ returned 600,000 results.

It’s clear that the phrase ‘Best British blog contest 2008‘ will be the easiest one to effect; the phrase most likely to show up in search results when copied by relatively few people.

It is also the link to the CiB page describing this year’s weblog contest. It means that anyone searching for all of those words should come across a link to that page fairly quickly. (Some people will know the nickname for that process, but I’m not going to mention it here.)

So I’m hoping a bunch of bloggers will copy the link above into a blog post of their own between now and Tuesday January 13; that search results will reflect that link, and that it will prompt more people to vote in that contest. It might even get to the point where Best British blog 2008 becomes an accurate link.

PS: it seems a bit odd to be voting on last year’s best blog. Here we are in 2009, so nominating and voting for a 2008 effort seems strange. I guess it’s just belated recognition for having done good last year.