Lessons from Vista Babble
by Randall McCarley
March 19th, 2007
First, a note of congratulations to my friend Donna. Donna has been a wealth of inspiration and knowledge in the forums for years. She helped me get started with SEO and for that I will always be grateful. One of her latest ventures is Vista Babble, a forum dedicated to the new Microsoft OS and it is doing great!
As of this writing, there are over 2,000 members and 1,000 threads. Vista Babble is a “Top 100 Windows Vista Site”. And Vista Babble even picked up a link from Microsoft’s own Vista support pages.
Rumor has it that some really big things are coming for Vista Babble and that it is going to become an even more important part of the Vista community.
Congratulations Donna on all your success with Vista Babble - you definitely deserve it!
Now some lessons for the rest of us!
A couple months ago Rand posted Predicting Search Queries Before Demand Arrives where he discusses the tactic of selecting keyword phrases based on anticipated traffic before everyone else starts fighting for them. Donna’s Vista Babble is an excellent example of this in action. By getting in on the ground floor and putting a bit of work into a site before the demand arrives you can establish yourself as THE authority before there is any competition. How great is that?
This isn’t a new tactic and some SEOs specialize in small-scale websites that they expect will bring traffic based on emerging trends like new tv shows, celebrities, etc.
What sets Vista Babble apart is the scale of implementation. Donna didn’t just try to drive some keyword traffic; she thought long-term and created a community around a new theme: Windows Vista. She also put a lot of attention on crafting the look of the site making sure it would stand apart from any sites with a similar idea.
But what if you have an existing website? How can you get ahead of your competition?
I’ve enjoyed some success with “predictive search” at 14th Colony with the article About Social Bookmarks. Social Bookmarking was all the buzz in the forums but nobody had put together what it was all about in one place as a resource. That article got such a strong response I did a follow-up.
Depending on your industry you may need to do some clever thinking to get ahead of the game but the best two tips I have are:
1. Pay Attention - Listen to the buzz in your industry and pay attention to the news.
2. Give it a Shot - The problem with predictive search is that you can’t always be right. Some terms just won’t jump. But you’ll never get the ones that do unless you try!
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