From: Robert Pearson's Blog

Chess and Baseball - "Interchangeable Skills?" - You decide as Yankee's manager Joe Girardi talks about the two games (Video Permalink).

Thanks for posting this to your blog, Robert.

OMG! if you found your way to this post through a search or a link then Robert was right.

I suspect this article will serve as a hub to get quite a number of links because the 'science' seems sound ... see Robert's post on his blog.

Of course his post is filled with the odd links that are bound to get him some link love ... but I prefer to keep things totally chess-related.

What? You're looking for the Cutest Chess Pic EVER? Try this one ... Hou Yifan & Alexandra Kosteniuk:

I'm writing this article in response to a comment left by Robert on an article I wrote about his blog. If you've done much searching for 'chess', 'chess blog', or other related terms then no doubt you have come across Robert's blog perhaps even unwittingly. There is no doubt in my mind that Robert has more traffic than even Chessvine (although this blog is still in infancy and in recent time has experienced some growing pain). So, why is Robert so highly placed by search engines? I'd like to present a few tangible as well as possible explanations in the hopes that chess enthusiasts will take advantage of the free advice.

1) The Blog's URL: There is nothing worse than a blog with an odd url. It makes you hard to find when people search. As an example: How many people do you suppose type in 'chessvine' to find chess news ... probably less than you think. However, the term 'chess blog' would no doubt love to see the URL "rlpchessblog.blogspot.com"

2) The blog description includes "Chess" For some time I accidentally allowed Chessvine's description to read "News and opinion fresh off the vine" ... unforgivable ... traffic boomed when I put "chess news and opinion fresh off the vine". It's part of meta-data, which search engines use to classify all websites (not just blogs) and for the technically minded you can find this content in the header tag of every page you visit (just find the "View Page Source" option in your browser menu). Robert has the word 'chess' as part of his meta-data ... he didn't know he did that but it's a signpost to search engines.

3) Original content - Chessvine suffers from my information addiction. I'd prefer to provide the words of others and give my take on it. Search engines tend to view this as a form of plagarism and ignore the content ... only looking at what seems different. Robert produces his own views more clearly and in longer installments. Search engines love alot of original text!

4) the link love - Robert provides link to all over the place ... not even restricted to chess sites.

5) the writing style- Robert presents everything in a humorous and almost cheeky manner ... he's a natural born chess comedian and I think this serves him very well. He keeps readers engaged with the humor and they come back for more!


I hope this answers Robert's question and I hope he keeps blogging for years to come!

I was wandering through chessblogland and came across the well-placed search engine optimized chess blog of Robert Pearson. His recent article on the Caro-Kann gave me a laugh (as a practitioner). In that article he includes a link to this familiar Star Trek reference:
I also couldn't help but notice that Robert has been posting youtube videos recently. Did Chessvine follow a trend? Ironically, I added the videos over the weekend to be odd and different ... oh, well.