When it comes to Easter egg hunts, most people think of a fairly small and sedate affair carried out in the back garden, the grounds of a church, a park or village square, with a group of local children searching high and low for tasty confectionery treats. Where else but in the USA would there be space to contest the world’s largest ever Easter egg hunt, which took place on 1st April 2007?
Rest assured that this is no premature April Fool’s joke. According to the Guinness World Records’ official statistics, a total of 501,000 eggs were hunted for by 9,753 children.
The Great Online Easter Egg Hunt
No less difficult to find, but perhaps more accessible by way of your laptop are online Easter eggs, the best of which were rounded up by the BBC for a feature recently. Named after the old tradition of hiding treats inside an Easter egg, the fun features recounted by the BBC include a TARDIS situated at Earls’ Court Station on Google Earth, the directions which appear on Google Maps when asking to go from The Shire to Mordor and some of the things that happen if you type the old Konami cheat code (Up up, down down, left, right, left, right, b and a, for the uninitiated) into websites. Also touched upon, but lamented since it no longer works, was the ability to play snake whilst a YouTube clip buffers.
Make Your Site Less Like an Easter Egg
Easter eggs are fun features to be found and shared online, but rather than keeping your own site a secret, your business should be employing a wide range of strategies in order to make it as high-profile and visible as possible. These strategies are designed to launch your site up the search engine rankings, getting you closer to the coveted top spot for searches related to your product or industry. Once upon a time, this so-called search engine optimisation was a far simpler task, achieved in many cases by placing a lot of links and keywords on vaguely related pages in order to inflate a site’s position in the rankings. Thanks to Google’s constant drive to improve their ranking algorithm, the practice of search engine optimisation is today a far more involved affair.
Sites are ranked based on the valuable content featured on their pages, so the so-called ‘link farms’ which used to satisfy the old algorithm’s need for sites to be linked to get marked down dramatically under the new regime. This means they have largely disappeared from the internet. In order to comply with the rules laid out by a search engine, a site should have regular new content which both reads well and is not obviously written to include obscure and irrelevant keywords. Any good optimisation strategy will ensure that all pages of your site work with the search engine’s algorithm in order to give your site a boost up the ranking pages. Specialists such as www.elevateuk.com can help you to design and implement such a strategy.
Making your site far more visible than an Easter egg will take some work, but getting a boost through the rankings should see your visitor numbers rise.