In pursuit of the iPod Nano

So my office has recently intro­duced yet another employee contest. They’ve begun to do a good job of dangling appro­pri­ately selected carrots in front of us, and this month’s contest is no excep­tion: the iPod Nano! My part in all of this is that I put little Netsol buttons in various places, and hope­fully some of you click on them. At the end of the month they get counted and the people with the most links, on the most pages, with the most clicks, get iPod Nanos. I didn’t win the airline miles in the last contest, but I figure this is right up my alley.
So if, over the next few weeks, you see me peri­od­i­cally put a little link like this..

Web Design and Web Hosting services
from the orig­inal domain name regis­trar,
Network Solutions
.. in my blog posts (its already on all my new-and-improved archive pages), give me a little boost and click it. :)

Techie Note: What moti­vates a company run a promo­tion like this? Besides boosting morale and getting its employees more involved on the web, the main benefit reaped by this type of contest is in search engine rank­ings. (The uptick in our traffic will prob­ably be a drop in the bucket.) Major search engines like Google rank their results using all sorts of complex algo­rithms. But one of the main compo­nents they use to deter­mine the rele­vance of a site is how many other websites link to it using the words that were searched on. For the cost of a couple iPods, the company gets valid, contex­tual, inbound links on thou­sands of pages that then get indexed by dozens of search engines. The impact is as good as anything a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consul­tant could deliver, and a whole lot cheaper. Its a pretty creative approach, really, which is why I’m participating.