How to Set a SEO Contest

Are you a seo company and want to hire some new seo experts? Or, do you have some money and want to promote your company's profile? Or simply, do you want to test search engine spiders and algorithms? A good way to achieve all these is organizing a SEO contest. Here are a few tips which can help you set a successful SEO contest.

Setting the prize value

First of all chose the search engine which will be used in order to select the contest winner. As Google is the main search engine used by everyone, most of the SEO contests are organized for optimizing a keyword/phrase for Google. If you could afford to spend more money, you can organize a more complex contest for all top 3 search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN. After you chose the search engine you'll have to set the prizes values. It's recommended to award a prize to at least all top 10 pages from the SERPS. When you try to figure out what value to chose you have to take in consideration that a SEO campaign for one website during a month values somewhere between 200 and 300 US dollars. The higher you pay, the more competitors you'll have.

Choosing the duration of the contest

Depending on the amount of money you have, you can decide duration between 4 and 10-12 months. I say 4 months because Google needs time to make the updates which are not so frequent. A period longer than 10-12 months will make the competitors get bored because such a long period for optimizing for just one keyword/phrase is not so thrilling...

Choosing the Data Center

Depending on the targeted competitors you can chose from a specific data center, if you are interested in a regional business, like Google.xx (where xx is the country extension, like de for Germany) or you can chose Google.com with no preference settings. It is very important to announce the arbitrator data center before starting the contest.

Setting the contest rules

As SEO is divided into black and white hat SEO, I bet you don't want to spot your company's name, so you'll have to set some rules for the contestants. As spam might be involved in this kind of contests it's better to set strict rules in this "region". It's hard to define a limit between spam and non spam activities, but you can choose some generic rules.

Selecting the search keyword / phrase

As these contests stimulate lots of non content WebPages, it's recommended to choose a keyword/phrase which doesn't have results when searching at the beginning of the contest, in order not to pollute any relevant word(s) SERPs. It's also recommended to select a keyword/phrase related to your company/brand (you spend the money, but you surely want to get something instead?). The past organizers adopted the reverse writing of their brand name, which generates an abstract word , or one word writing of the site's address, something like BrandDotCom, which usually also generates abstract nonexistent words. You can also be ingenious and refuse past models and chose another kind of keyword/phrase.

5 other tips

It's important to announce the contest with at least one month before, especially if you invest much money and expect many contestants. Try to mediate the contest as much as you can/afford in order to bring in contestants. Set the rules as clear as you can and try not to change the basic ones during the contest. Take a look at other big SEO contests history and learn from their experience. Don't organize a contest while another one takes place; people usually like to participate at just one contest, not at 2-3 in the same time.

I can't guarantee that these few tips will surely turn your project into a sucessful one. As a participant to the chml srucnoc seo contest, organized by CHML company from Romania, I can assure you that if you don't follow at least these simple rules you'll contest will turn into a mess. Good luck!





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