So here it is, the inevitable World Cup blog post…someone had to do it.

You’re probably asking yourself what does the World Cup have to do with SEO?

Well, not a lot really. But where there is a quick buck to be made businesses will be sure to take advantage…or so you’d think.

Type ‘World Cup’ into Google the day before the tournament kicks-off and there should be a deluge of football sites, sports sites, sponsors, fans and so on.

Of course the Fifa site is at the top, Wikipedia follows, and there are some news sites. Towards the bottom of page 1 we have the Rugby World Cup and William Hill.

William Hill has done a good job to get there for such a massive phrase but I am surprised there are not more relevant sites on page 1.

Looking at this chart from Google Insights you can see that searches for ‘World Cup’ have shot up over the last two weeks.

Maybe, optimising for ‘World Cup’ would be difficult, and obviously spammy, for most sites as they have nothing to do with football, South Africa or Wayne Rooney’s temper.

Though holiday sites seem to be trying to take advantage and the top result for ‘World Cup Theme’ is Teacher Planet with World Cup Worksheets…good job Teacher Planet.

I am sure someone somewhere on the internet is making a good amount of money from optimising World Cup related keywords.

The sites succeeding will be the sites that have planned some form of strategy, done a little research and finished their optimisation ‘early doors’ rather than trying to ‘bundle in a last minute winner’ (football vernacular ).

P.S. Okay, I can’t write a football related blog post without comparing players and teams to SEO elements.

So here goes:

England – one man band (one great page with fantastic PR), over hyped (undeserved high ranking in Google).

France – disorganised (poor code), skill (some nice design).

Argentina – individual skill (slick design on individual pages), under dogs (low PR but liable to jump up the rankings), mad man (piece of erratic javascript)

Germany – lacking flair (simple design), organised (really nice coding), team work (great internal linking)

Italy – over achieved last time (has high PR), poor results in warm ups (few visitors)

Brazil – good attack (lots of back links), flair (innovative design), all round strength (amazing site with few flaws)

Spain –good team work (good internal linking), skill, can they handle the pressure? (maintaining current strategy?)

My prediction: England lose 1-0 to France in the quarter-finals.

Do you agree with the SEO comparison or my prediction?

P.P.S Thanks to Pete for suggesting this link as being useful