Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

http://pascal.vanhecke.info/2006/03/10/sitedeals15-released-im-in

The above page is a great post about different strategies employed in SEO contests.  The most obvious is to make a page about the contest, talking about the rules and winners and who’s moving up and down in the ranks.  The side benefit of this page is that it remains relevant for the nonsense term even after the contest ends.  The downside is that everyone else is doing the same time.  That doesn’t really matter to the search engine I don’t think, but it’s harder to stand out from the rest of the pack.  I prefer the humorous entry, like the Chml Srucnoc for President page I once made. It is a lot more fun to read and fun to write IMHO.  As long as the content doesn’t matter, why not have some fun with it?  Start a comic strip with that as a character name or location.  Start an online petition to rename the moon to what ever the key words are.  I enjoy seeing people do those sort of weird things a lot more than simply slapping together junk content (I guess I’m oddly enough implying that online petitions to rename the moon aren’t junk content).SEO contests are interesting to me. Winning definitely certifies an SEO pro as at least marginally capable, and it often signifies great competence. What’s interesting to me is that no quality SEO professional would waste much time trying to win one of these things… their time is far too valuable, so contestants are the self-selected ugly ducklings of the industry.

So should an SEO participate? I did in the one I mentioned above but I can’t yet say if it was / will be a successful strategy (will it get me any clients or notoriety?… not yet). One side benefit of the humorous contest entry strategy is that it’s fun (for me at least) to participate. Chuckling at my own wackiness while typing a page doesn’t feel like work. A waste of time… yeah OK. But not work.