I have been doing some experiments on my gadget review blog lately (which is run on WordPress) and here’s what I discovered:
1) Never allow search engines to index your tag/archive/category pages. My rankings dropped dramatically since I allowed that and from 2k unique visits from Big G I’m now receiving barely 200.
2) Do not use the following permalink structure: blogurl.com/category/postname/; I used it and my rankings fell even more.
3) Enable “Show full post” in wp options, don’t make it show a brief of the article then a “Read the full article” link. Search engines sometimes treat is as duplicate content
4) Do NOT create tags. Even if you make search engines disallow them, if one was already indexed, it’s too late. NEVER create tag pages, I will always remember this mistake. It still costs me lots of visitors.
That’s about all I discovered so far. 
The guides at about.com are looking for what they call deep links. This may not necessarily be your homepage, but rather an article that you have written from an “expert” point of view.
Your best plan of attack is to:
•Pick an “about” category that suits your site.
•Submit an article that you have written on one of your domain pages.
•Offer a link back. Put a link to their site even before contacting them and said, “I find your site such a great resource that I’ve listed you in our links page.
As you can see becoming completely search engine optimized can be a great deal of work. Your success level might depend on the number of hours you are willing to put into writing search engine optimized words, titles and metatags and the amount of care that you are willing to put into the process of search engine submission. Why are you doing all this again? It is because getting listed in these directories can boost your rankings in Google and other search engine directories!
The second TST day was worse than the first one.
There was a damn geometry-related problem which I couldn’t solve. I scored only 45/300. Totally, I have 140 points which isn’t enough for me to qualify to IOI and BOI.
Oh well, hope to do better next year.
