Search
engine optimization or SEO as it is widely known as to those in the internet
marketing business, is the art of making a web site attractive to search
engines. The result of having a site that is attractive to search engines is
having the web site rank well for a given key word or key phrase.
In an SEO
Contest, the execution of the art becomes slightly skewed. For instance, the
first rule of SEO should be to build your site for the people and not for the
search engines. However, the contest environment is vastly different. For one
thing, SEO Contests are short lived. You are aiming for short term results
quickly, the tactics you might use could end up getting you penalized by
engines such as Google in the long term but can be beneficial for a contest
lasting only a few months.
One such
tactic is keyword stuffing. For instance, in the ambatchdotcom
seocontest the top 3 contestants average keyword density is 50% of
the title, 3% of the body, 8% in H tags, 15% in links. On the other hand, the
top ranking site in Google for the key phrase “SEO Strategy†has 0% in the
title, .2% in the body, 0% in H tags and 2.3% in links.
Clearly
keyword density does not matter much in the long run but to achieve quick
results, it is one of the tactics used in contests.
Obtaining
links from other websites (backlinks) is THE first line tactic used to rank
your website high in the search results. Typically one would attempt to obtain
links from related web sites using a variety of anchor texts with target
keywords. It is also desirable to “deep link†to internal pages and not
just links to your main page.
In an SEO
contest, participants are more likely to stick to using only the target
keyphrase for their anchor text and they are also more likely to link solely to
the main page of the site as well. In the long term, sites with better and more
varied backlinks would quickly over take these contest sites in the search
engine results.
Finally, in
the backlink equation is relevancy. It’s not very difficult in normal
circumstances to find a site that is related to your target keyword. If your
content is valuable, over time you will obtain organic links, that is, other
webmasters will voluntarily link to your site as a resource. You can also trade
links with sites sharing your theme and even buy links on related sites. In an
SEO contest, finding a related site is difficult because the keyword or key
phrase doesn’t typically exist therefore relevancy is non existent.
So in SEO
contests it becomes a matter of quantity and quality rather than relevance of
the links. Participants in the ambatchdotcom seocontest have backlinks from
every imaginable type of site and as long as Google doesn’t catch up with the
contest, and make it’s determination of what is relevant, it’s likely that
relevancy wont be an issue.
In
conclusion, while the same strategies exist for day to day SEO and SEO
contests, some strategies weigh more heavily and that is due to the duration of
the contest. Web sites should be built for people first and then fine tuned for
search engines. Webmasters must never loose sight of this all important fact.
The bottom line is that no matter how high your site ranks in the search engine
results, if it doesn’t attract a visitor and does not contain content worth
reading then your visitors will not stay and they will not return. That is real
world SEO.
