IT Milk: entry

I was browsing through some Facebook Groups and came across this search engine optimization tournament: www.seoworldchampionship.com. I’ve never heard of SEO contests before, and the idea would seem wasteful at first glance. SEO is usually for a constructive purpose, so why would you muck up search results with temporary websites that have no other purpose than to rank well and exist only for the duration of the contest?

That’s why SEO World Championship chooses narrow key phrases like “globalwarming awareness2007″ rather than “global warming awareness.” We isolate the contest progress by tracking a search term that would not be searched by everyday surfers, but is relevant enough to current events to be practical.

The participants have a great opportunity to hone their SEO skills in a theoretical practice ground. The contest discourages black hat SEO techniques, but this would be a great chance to test creative tricks that just might work, but which you would never risk doing for a real established website in fear of a Google penalty.

Contestants are given about 4 months to achieve the highest ranking for a certain search term. The current phrase is “globalwarming awareness2007.” Check out the current rankings for this period’s SEO contest.

Ultimately, the incentives of the contest are alluring enough to compensate for the many hours that you spill into this effort. The top 3 contestants respectively win a car, a Carribean cruise and a Sony plasma TV.

Even if you don’t compete for the SEO contest, you can study the top ranking competitors and view in real-time what they are doing to achieve their rankings. A definite observation from a quick skim is that blogs are the fastest and most efficient way to rank for a term. It’s not surprising because you can pack in the keyword density repeatedly and give the website fresh content without seeming conspicuous.

Since I stumbled on this too late and missed the bandwagon, I’ll prepare myself for the next contest in May to see how I fare against all the world’s aspiring search engine optimizers.