SEO Blog - Marcus Westberg

This is small guide you would need to read if you are thinking about participtating in an SEO contest.

Lately there has been many search engine optimization contests going on in every corner of the
internet, to name a few you might recognize we have V7ndotcom Elursrebmem, Carcasherdotcom SEOcontest and ambatchdotcom seocontest etc etc.
As you know the purpose of all these contests is to rank as high as possible in specific search engines
such as Google, Yahoo and MSN which are also the three most popular ones.

Before you get started

Make sure your contest entry has the keyword or the keywords in the URL:
For example if you want to join the Carcasherdotcom Seocontest your URL should look something like this:

Domain: http://www.carcasherdotcomseocontest.cc/
Subpage: http://www.marcuswestberg.com/carcasherdotcom-seocontest/
Subdomain: http://carcasherdotcomseocontest.yoursite.com

In case you are wondering if you need to include a hyphen or not the answer is that it doesn´t
really matter, normally at the start of SEO contest all good domain are gone fast like the .com
.net etc… so take whatever you can get.
You dont need to register an entire domain just to win an seo contest, a subpage is just fine
and has already got the benfit of beeing located at your regular domain that already has some
Google trustrank so dont worry about that. The third option is the subdomain which should be avoided
unless you already have an old subdomain with the specific keyword in it.

Consider this

Make sure you join the contest at the time the keywords are beeing anounced so that your contest site
gets indexed as fast as possible. The age factor of a site does matter when it comes to ranking high.

Structure your contest site/page

You need to make sure that the contest keyword is repeated over and over again on your site and
it needs to be written in these places:

TITLE: The most important factor, this tells the visitor what your site is about
HEADER TAGS: Make sure you have the keyword in at least one of your header tags.
(dont over do it by spamming H1 - H6 with the exact same keyword phrase.)
IN THE CONTENT: Repeat the keyword every now and then in the text.
META DESC: keyword here
META KEYWORDS: keyword here

Final step and also the hardest part

Now you are ready to rank! But berfore you can do that you need inbound links to your site.
It is very important that you get links that are related to your keywords, rather get one related link
then 5 unrelated links. You need to show the search engines that your site´s URL is repeated everywhere
there is text written about your desired keyword.

Use your imagination

It is hard getting related links at a high rate unless you have a smart idea, some kind of linkbait
that will make webmasters link to your site just because they like it and not because they have to.

Final words

If I ever would win an SEO contest then I am going to write a more extensive article with some more things explained in detail but right now you have to settle with this