Dabbling in SEO Artistry

On July 14th 2006, on a whim, I decided to enter a SEO contest. At the time I really had no idea what this would involve.

The Ambatchdotcom Seocontest is 2 months old and surprisingly, at least to me, I'm doing fairly well.

The object of the SEO contest is to create a web site, or a page, optimized for the search phrase ‘ambatchdotcom seocontest' and to achieve the top ranking in Google for that phrase. The contest ends on October 20th 2006

On July 14th a search for ambatchdotcom seocontest returned no results. Today, the same search will show 941,000 results. Today, you can find my ambatchdotcom seocontest entry on page 1 in the third position. Not too shabby for someone just dabbling.

In my opinion, SEO is part science, part art, part luck and a lot of instinct.

After working for the first time at targeting a specific key word I have formed some opinions on best practices for SEO.

1. Know your topic. When it comes to a contest of this type, it's impossible to know your topic because the key word or key phrase for a contest is usually a meaningless term but that creates a challenge to provide content. Very similar to someone attempting to build a site around a subject when they have no real knowledge of the topic.
2. Once you know which topic you are going to cover, pick your target keywords. Do your research and look for niche keywords. There are many online services that offer keyword suggestions.
3. Determine your main target keyword and attempt to get it in your domain name. While having your keyword or key phrase in your domain name does not guarantee top search engine placement, it certainly holds an advantage.
4. Use meta tags effectively. Use the title, keyword and description meta tags to your advantage. Use your keywords in the title tag and description but avoid keyword stuffing as it can get you banned by some search engines.
5. Build content for visitors. Write your content for the people you are targeting first. Then go back over and tweak it with some appropriate keywords.
6. Fresh content. The search engines like fresh content so it's not enough to build a site and forget it. It's a perpetual job to keep your site dynamic and fresh.
7. Get backlinks. Organically, backlinks happen when other sites find your site to be a valuable resource and voluntarily link to it but with the sheer volume of sites on the internet, it's a hard climb to get those organic links. Submit to directories, exchange links with relevant sites and submit articles to get your site name out there and visible.

Personally I think that any webmaster doing their own SEO should attempt a SEO Contest at some point. I think it can be a valuable learning tool in really discovering what works and what doesn't on a level playing field. There aren't many other opportunities to target a keyword that has no competition.

Lisa Campbell is a participant in the currently running Ambatchdotcom Seocontest - you can see her entry at http://ambatch-dotcom-seocontest.com