Persons nowadays often take part in a challenge own as “Search Engine Optimization contests”. The aim of these contests is to reach to the top ranked page in the Google search results for a given period or phrase. The contests often take nonsensical words as their target as they don’t disturb “normal” search results. These contests are created generally for fun, and to put more lights about the Google’s ranking secrets – and probable methods for battering those rankings. Sometimes there were prizes given for the contests.

Today, there are numerous different SEO contests around at all time and it’s hard to keep record of all of them. I have mentioned some are as follows:

1.Kebapgraz

This SEO competition owes its name from “Döner Kebap,” a Turkish food popular in Europe. Almost all of the participants were from Germany or Austria, and used German-language pages. The contest started on June 16, 2004 till September 10, 2004 and the extent of web pages having the word went from 0 to around 1.67 Lakhs! Linkfarming (a large group of interlinked websites trying to increase their Google PageRank) or other kinds of spam were not allowed. The contest was organised by David Reisner (17 years), from Austria.

2.Mangeur de Cigogne

This was a French contest for the phrase “Mangeur de Cigogne.” Started by Promo-Web, it began on March 2004, and ended in June 15 2005. This was one of the weirdest and most fanatical of all SEO contests. And obviously, because almost all of the content was French, one couldn’t apprehend a word of what occurred unless he/she was fluid in that. The literal meaning of “Mangeur de Cigogne” is “eaters of stork.” But, according to others, “It means nothing. This string was chosen to not contaminate Google results”. HTML optimization and other techniques were extensively used in this contest.

3.Nigritude Ultramarine

This was perhaps the largest SEO contest that ever took place. It got huge coverage including articles on Wired.com and technological sites such as Slashdot. The competition was organised by the SEO Company DarkBlue (literally meant “Nigritude Ultramarine”). A blogger named ‘Anil Das’ nearly won the top rank in the first round ending June 7, 2004 with a blog entry. Anil’s post was linked by several other high-profile blogs who wanted to push a budding star up the Google rankings. He  wanted to prove that good article content was far more better than immoral optimization tactics and he was successful in doing so. There are more than 215,000 web pages containing the phrase “Nigritude Ultramarine”.

 A Quick Guide to SEO

So how do you be able to win these SEO contests? This influenced by the search engine, but for Google, “on-page” optimization is useless in a competitive situation, and most of it depends on “off-page” optimization. “on-page” optimization means when one creates a page which repeats the target word in a variety of places, like in the meta keywords, in page headings, in the title and so on. What one does on his page might have an effect on the readers – which is certainly important – but it’s of very less value to the Googlebot and the way Google ranks the sites. For the given keywords in the competitions, all that Google is concerned is this: how many important pages links to one’s page using the same keywords as the link text? If one can get a lot of useful “backlinks” from respected web pages, then a high rank will come certainly.

So, the actual strategy is to grow good backlinks (preferably links containing the target keywords). Not essentially 100s of them; it’s of more value to get only a dozen high-valued backlinks, then a lakh low-valued backlinks. Now how does one get all those links from other websites? Here, we need to forget about technical things like optimization for a second. What’s vital now is to have excellent web page content, and to make it spread to the right people by submitting the link to blogs on the subject, emailing, spreading it majority news sites, or sharing it in social sites or forums relevant to the site. That means one needs to recognize a community, be part of it, and assist others. People generally won’t link to boring and possibly over-optimized pages, but they will surely link to those pages that help them.

Thank for reading this, stay tuned for more.