Top 10 Most Common Mistakes in Participating in SEO Contests

In the past few years the SEO contests are popping up in the search engine optimization world like crazy. There are always contests running, and everytime there is a prize to win, sometimes a big one, sometimes a small one. But it doesn’t matter in what contest you’re participating, you will allways find things that have gone wrong, or could’ve done better. In this article I point out the top 10 most common mistakes in participating in an SEO contest. 1) The first mistake is the fact that webmasters get so excited when they see a lot of money, that they point links to their contest page from all the pages of their already existing websites. You would have thousands of backlinks in just a few days, which would cause a sandbox penalty. You need to remember that you can allways point those links to your contest page, you are not in a hurry, are you? 2) The second mistake is that people don’t plan. You have to make yourself a scheme where you write down what you do every day/week. Make a linkbuilding scheme, a content writing scheme etc. Just make sure that you do what you tell yourself to do. 3) Make short term goals, the long term goal is offcourse the winning of the SEO contest. But if you make short term goals you don’t get demotivated and you have offcourse more chance of winning the SEO contest. For example doing 5 article submissions, 40 link directory submissions and write 20 quality pages by the end of may. Or make a goal like this: I will be indexed by the first of may. Or, I will be on the third page in week 5 of the contest. 4) Write content, A lot of people start a contest blog, but they forget to write content. In the beginning you often write a lot of posts, but in the long run you get more focused on backlinks. Remember that content is still king. And if you have it, and others don’t, you already have a head start. 5) Quality backlinks over crappy backlinks. A lot of people start by searching for easy backlinks like directories and buying high pagerank links, but you can do that any time you want in the contest. Do that half way, you have all the time! The first thing you do in participating in an SEO contest is writing content and finding topic related backlinks. The crappy backlinks can wait. You are not in a hurry! 6) Article submission, it’s easy and really effective, this article is actually written to boost my ranking for the pvmultimedia seo contest. If I wasn’t participating, this article would’ve never been written. The good thing with article submission is that you can decide what the article is about. So in some way you control the onsite optimization of your backlink, so you can make yourself a highly onpage optimized quality backlink that is related to your contest page. You can also use the main contest keyword as much as you like, so right now I’ll take the opportunity to use the words pvmultimedia seo contest once more if you don’t mind . 7) Onsite optimization, don’t do it!!! Why? very simple, if you can rank yourself to the top without using for instance your main keywords in your title, you have a backup plan, namely your onpage optimization. A few weeks before the contest you can highly optimize your website for the main keyphrase to get a good boost that can get you to the top, or if you already are at the first spot, you made yourself a really more solid position. And onpage optimization is something you can manipulate and control, offpage optimization is a component that can’t be manipulated quickly. But make sure you don’t overdo your onpage optimization in the end, because that could cause a penalty or even a ban. Old and wise. If you have a question, would you ask an old wise man or a little boy? Probably the old man, right? Search engines (Dutch translation: zoekmachine) think the same. If a website is new it is less valuable than if there is an old website/domain about the same topic. So stop registering new domains for your contest websites, just use an old one, or a subdomain of an old domain. Maybe you won’t have the perfect url, but you do have the perfect age to take advantage from. 9) Authority, like I said before, I’m participating in the pvmultimedia seo contest. On dutch forums there was some discussion about how the hell it was possible that the top 10 for pvmultimedia seo contest was dominated by blogspot blogs. Well, because blogspot is an authority domain, even owned by google itself. Use that authority if you can. Or if you have yourself an authority website it’s even better to use that website. 10) Analyse other participants, most people don’t look at other participating websites. But if you do take a look at them you can actually find out how they’re getting links, how many links they get in a specific period of time, from what websites the links are from, are the links quality topic related high pagerank links? How can I get those links? What do they do with their onpage optimization? etc… So in fact there are many things you can do or must not do in order to get a chance to win an SEO contest. One last tip from me: start small, if you can win a small/local SEO contest with a small price, you can later on participate in the bigass SEO contests and become rich…

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