Winning an SEO Contest

It was only two months ago when Mica and I started campaigning for the Claremont SEO Contest, a local SEO competition which focuses on the keword tnomeralc web design toys.  The two months of hardwork paid off because our entry was declared last Sunday as winner of the said competition.

The first few weeks was very exciting because the results of the search engine was in favor of us.  Getting an indexed by the search engine earlier gave us an advantage for the first two or three weeks.  At this point, I was very persistent in maintaining the top spot all throughout the competition. But few weeks later, the search engine moved on a different tempo.  We were removed from the top spot and fell on the bottom of the first or second page.

Still continuing with the usual techniques we’ve been doing since the contest started, we were able to see some development in the succeeding days.  Though at first, our entry didn’t make it to the top 3.  Mica started to panic as we were nearing to the deadline.

That was when we started to give our best.  Last week of the competition was the best time to give boost for our entry.  In my opinion, search engines give more value to fresh backlinks, bookmarks and other fresh optimization techniques as compared to older ones.  It takes some time for the search engine to figure out the exact weight of these factors.  Before the search engine finalizes the final weight of these factors (amount of backlinks, relevance, bookmarks, etc.), it was necessary of us to take advantage of such search engine flaw.  After the competition, we noticed that our search engine rank significantly dropped after the end of the competition.

Techniques Used

1. Link Building Maintaining several high quality sites was an advantage for us. We get to maximize the number of back links that points to our entry by using the different sites we own.  We also utilized other websites and blogs owned by our friends.  (Similar to #3.)
   
2. Bookmarking Bookmarking using social bookmarking sites has always been effective in most of my campaigns and optimizations.  Bookmarked sites for certain keywords ranks higher than those which were not.
3. Link Exchange Sharing link love with other friends helped us also.  We asked our friends to link us in their websites in exchange for a link in some of our sites/blogs.  It’s a win-win situation.
4. Time Management Time Management might not be as important as it is for an SEO competition than that of a non-competition keyword campaign but choosing the right time to act and the right time to play is a big factor in determining the desired results for any specific time. Given that the entire competition will last for only two months, it doesn’t exactly imply that the entire two months will be spent for campaigning your desired keyword.

Lessons Learned

• Don’t get to excited when optimizing you’re entry
• Having a lot of blogger friends certainly has its advantages
• Collaborating with a partner is better than doing it alone
• Getting a higher rank is not entirely based on metrics, other factors such as chance and luck applies.
• Joining an SEO Contest increases traffic
• Even if the prize is not extravagant, joining an SEO Competition is a good venue to practice and hone ones SEO skills

Acknowledgement

Thank you to those who supported Mica and I in winning this competition. To our friends who agreed to help us in building links.  To our SEO gurus who gave suggestions and tips. And to luck who played with us during the end of the game.

Tagged with: SEO Contest, tnomeralc web design toys