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.

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