Winner Of Inaugural New Zealand Search Engine Optimization Problem
Winner of inaugural New Zealand SEO Challenge
competition announced
New Zealands top
Google search engine specialists created almost half a
million Google entries as they battled for supremacy in the
NZ SEO challenge competition. One emerged
victorious.
Auckland, Tuesday
November 30th- After three months of tough
competition, the competition to find New Zealands top
search engine optimisation (SEO) specialist is over.
More
than 50 search engine specialists battled it out over the
past three months to attempt to seize the top position on
google.co.nz for the keyword quadracentifiable
a fictitious word invented specifically for the competition.
When the competition started on August 31st, there were zero
entries listed on Google.co.nz for the search term
quadracentifiable. Just three months later there are
almost half a million entries.
Top of the list when the
competition closed at 5pm on November 28th, was the website
run by Michael Brandon of SearchMasters , the winner of the
inaugural New Zealand SEO Challenge.
Competition
organiser, Adam Hutchinson of Texsys
in Christchurch, says he organised the competition to
provide a way for search engine optimisation experts to
showcase their skills, compare themselves against their
peers and to learn from each other.
With an increasing
number of people using Google to search for information,
ensuring your site is visible to people searching on Google
has become incredibly important. Thats what search engine
optimisation specialists do. They work with you to determine
what search terms your site should be showing up for, and
then work on structuring your websites design and content
before co-ordinating a number of initiatives to ensure it
ranks as highly as possible against those search terms.
Thats a skill that is part art and part science, he
says.
But, says Hutchinson, there are a lot of people
touting themselves as specialists who are either using
techniques called black hat techniques that
run the risk of having your site banned by Google, or who
are really not very expert in the art of optimising
websites.
So I thought a completion was a perfect way
to allow kiwi search engine specialists to publically
demonstrate their skills, he says. The best way to
know for sure whos good and whos not is to provide a
way for people to show what they can do. And along the way,
they got to have some fun and learn some tricks from each
other.
Competition entrants demonstrated great
innovation in some of the sites theyve created, coming up
with a huge range of definitions for the word
quadracentifiable, and even, in one case, creating a
website for a fictitious New Zealand band with hit songs
like Jeremiah was a Full Blog and How am I Supposed
to Rank Without You?
In the end it was, according to
the winner, sheer hard-work, determination and time that won
the competition. The competition has been all about
linking. Who has access to the most links, and the most
powerful links from other websites into their competition
website. If you need hundreds of other websites to link to
you or to client websites, you need a good strategy, and you
need it to be cost efficient. We wrote articles that
contained links into our sites, then republished unique
versions on many websites. The way we executed this proved
to be the difference, Brandon says.
Hutchinson says
that the competition has been a lot of fun and a great
success, and he looks forward to organising it again in
2011. In the meantime though, he says, the winner of the
2010 NZ SEO Challenge can legitimately brag that theyre
New Zealands top search engine optimisation
specialist.
ENDS
