Why join an SEO contest?

I recently encouraged a young blogger to join an SEO contest and believe that such will even help her become a better blogger and be more strategic in approach.

Joining an SEO contest has its own benefits that includes:

1. Learn by trial and observation
   You will be able to put your skill to the test and observe how the top performers do it. Through it, you'll be able to try what they have done in your site and see how it improves your rank.
   
   
2. Launch your SEO career
   It is a way to introduce yourself as an SEO practitioner and use it as part of your portfolio. This is especially true if you end up in page 1 versus those who have joined the contest.
   
   
3. Build connection
   Get to know other players in the field and establish relationship. Most SEO practitioners don't do things on their own especially for big projects and often require help from their peers which may result to projects.

Do it alone or with a team?
Whe i first joined a local SEO contest, I was alone using this blog to build my entry and inter-link it with my other blogs. Got a few linking help from 2-3 other sites and that was it. The experience was most rewarding in terms of content building and recognized my weakness in terms of link building outside of my own set of sites. There were only 3 ituloy angsulong girls who made the final count and it was fun.

The next one I joined was more spontaneous decision on my part. I decided on the spot last year to help Gary Viray compete in the Busby SEO Test global SEO competition. The contest was fierce, furious, stressful, passionate, and ruthless. I learned a lot more about error pages, effective indexing, content pillar development, and link building. It has become my favorite case study whenever I get to talk about search engine marketing & optimization.

To ensure that what was started doesn't go to waste, continuous maintenance are being made as no one really knows when I'll get the urge to join or help someone again.

So if you really think that you are good in SEO, joining a contest is a must investment for professional development. Of course, choose those that are worth your while.

High Stake SEO Gambling

(Photo shot at DigitalFilipino.com Club and Bloggers Cebu Eyeball at Casino Filipino, October 23, 2008)

In my column yesterday, I talked about the benefits and some lessons learned in joining an SEO competition. As this blog is where I got the chance to put my initial SEO knowledge to the test, I will be using this to chronicle some of the highlights in this journey.

On day 15, our entry entered page 1 for the first time with the site having no less than 200 visits a day. I'm quite happy about this as it took me 75 days before I was able to hit 100 visits in ituloy angsulong and never got around to reach 200.

I'll be writing more about our lessons learned in this area and will share it with our club members this February once this whole competition is over.

My view of an SEO competition, at least when joining, is like entering a high-stake do-or-die gambling game. If you want to conquer or outperform yourself, what you've done in the past, you have to give everything. This also includes putting everything aside, including emotion or biases, just to hit that big goal. And with the right leader, worthy of such support, the journey is just beginning for us.

Sponsoring and Monitoring the Paradise Philippines SEO Competition

Last week, I disseminated information about the Paradise Philippines - P600,000 Bayanihan SEO contest where DigitalFilipino is one of the sponsors. From hereon, I will be monitoring developments in the competition.

My motivation in sponsoring the contest and how I'll measure its effectiveness includes:

• increase in search engine ranking of the sites I'm promoting through the competition.
• increase membership in my two communities.
• attract bloggers and content writers to join my ad revenue and content writing programs.
• get my personal site associated with the Filipina keyword.
• sustaining my primary website's campaign as an e-commerce resource.

Whether I will succeed in doing the above remains to be seen in the months to come. Once the contest code generator is up and entries began posting the code in their site, I shall be monitoring its effectiveness and write about my observations.

Those who will blog about the things I post here and provide interesting insights, can expect link love as well. This applies to old and new posts.

Have fun to all Paradise Philippines - P600,000 Bayanihan SEO contest competition participants!

What happened to Vorgermilten SEO contest?

I just read an appeal of Benj Arriola who joined the Vorgermilten SEO contest. However, as it is going now, the contest is being dubbed as a hoax by some of the participants as the contest page is already gone.

Benj Arriola's entry ranked well on Google and Yahoo. He can also be considered as one of the contest winners. That is if he remained number 1 in Google to win at least US$10,000.

I wonder how will this affect the credibility of SEO contests in the future.