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Last June the first Philippine SEO Contest was announced to the public and thecontest was open to everyone, both SEO experts and amateurs. More than 70 entrieswere submitted and the contest will end on September 29th. The winners will bedetermined by the Google Philippines Search Engine Results Page.
All contestants did everything they can to get it to the top. Both White Hat andBlack Hat SEO techniques are involved in the contest and the SEO community
Aaron Wall made a comment on this SEO Contests with regards to comment spamming andthis raised a concern with the rest of the SEO community worldwide. Somehow thiscontest is becoming to look like spamming contest to some and the contestants arenow changing their strategy to prevent their site from being eventually banned.
So what does it take to be on the top spot? Below are the general SEO techniquesmost of the contestants have done for the first month of this competition.
1. On-Page Optimization - The entry sites are being designed to make it as Googlefriendly as possible. Good Site Navigation, 5 to 7% Keyword Density, inserting MetaTags, using Google Site Maps and implementing Google Adwords are among the mostcommon techniques being implemented on these sites. Many are using WordPress becauseit is easy to build and it is known to be SEO friendly.
2. Link Building - The entry sites are submitted on almost all forums, blogs anddirectories out there. Even though some sites are totally unrelated to the entrysite, many are still linking their sites there because of the site's high GooglePageRank and Backlinks is the Google's top priority in ranking websites.
3. Articles - Articles are submitted to feeders and article sites. Some haveviolated copyright laws by using articles made by other people and made it as theirown. Many SEO's agree that article writing helps the site's ranking a lot and manyhave submitted several articles just to get their site noticed.
4. Black Hat - Unfortunately, black hat techniques are being used. Spam blogging,duplicate sites and other unfriendly techniques are being used to get their site tothe top. I could not blame them because most of the SEO contestants have no actualexperience in SEO before this contest and they are still learning the differencebetween ethical and unethical SEO.
In the end, only Google-friendly sites will remain on the top spot and black hatterswill most likely be banned in Google in the awards night.
So what is the lesson here? For the 30 days, I have learned that SEO is not veryhard to learn, but for a site to be on the top spot, it would need a lot of work andit takes time.
To learn more about this SEO Contest, please visit this site:http://isulongseoph.offs horeoutsourcingphilippines.com
