Search Engine Optimisation Competition Win
How we scored the major success of getting listed first
An article about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques was commissioned
by .net magazine, and a centrepiece of this is a competition between six SEO
companies.
Click here for results so far.
The Idea
This is the cover feature - so it will have lots of useful information in it
for readers who want to get their sites to the top of Google's listings as well
as being an entertaining, enjoyable read.
One of the things readers continually tell the magazine is that they
want more information about SEO techniques, and the editor thought it would be
interesting if they were to take inspiration from the legendary "nigritude
ultramarine" SEO contest and pit a few top SEOs against one another in a similar
experiment. The idea would be for the magazine to choose a phrase that
currently generates zero Google results -
crystalline incandescence,
and to give the same phrase to each of the SEOs; after a month, they'd see whose
site was the top of the pops on Google, Yahoo! and MSN for a search on
crystalline incandescence.
No Rules
There would be no rules - if a respectable SEO wanted to play dirty and use
all kinds of underhand tricks that they wouldn't use for a real client, that
would be just as interesting as (and potentially more fun than) legit techniques
- the magazine can offer the SEOs a good plug: a photo, URL and blurb about them
and why they're so great, followed by a few paragraphs explaining how the SEO
approached it, what the results were and what lessons their readers can learn
from their SEO expertise.
Six Search Engine Optimisers were given the challenge to optimise for
crystalline incandescence,
then each SEO has to explain what methods they used and how they went about it.
The magazine also has a control page - with basic meta tags and then do nothing,
to see how far down the search results it ends up.
Potential Downside and Upside
As you can see, there's a potential down side here: not everyone can win the
competition side of things. But that's why some companies might think it
worthwhile going to extremes, trying some unusual techniques, having some fun
with
crystalline incandescence.
Obviously the article will say "well done" to whoever comes top, but they
will NOT say that automatically implies the winner is the best. It's really just
a bit of fun.
The plus side is we then get to talk about our business for a while, why we're
better than the competition, and we can offer wise words of advice to the
magazine's readers and so on.
The deadline isn't too far away, 23rd December in fact, although this may be
stretched to January 2nd. The contest was officially started on Friday 5th
November.
We scored the major success of getting listed first. Within four days of the
competition starting, the site we constructed specifically for the competition
was listed top on Google for "crystalline incandescence". We then practically no
further work on the special site, and it stayed top for two weeks, while our
competitors all worked hard to catch up.
We were also listed 3rd out of 56,300 results (and above all the competing
SEOs) for the single keyword
incandescence. In many ways this was a better achievement, as it more
closely corresponds to real life, where there is competition amongst a large
number of sites to get to the top. We got to 3rd position without specifically
optimising for the single keyword.
Legitimate Techniques Only
We only used legitimate techniques. We did not use keyword stuffing,
deceptive re-directs, hidden links, hidden or "cloaked" text or other techniques
which might get your site banned by search engines.
Please contact us if you think you might like our
help in getting your site seen!
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