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1ShoppingCart.com is Sponsoring an Entry in the 2006 World SEO Championship
*** Update ***
This SEO Contest ended on October 20, 2006. Our entry finished in 5th position out of 118 international competitors.
Thank you to everyone who supported our efforts by offering links on your websites during the Contest!
*** End Update ***
1ShoppingCart.com employee Michael Valiant, with design help from Matt Bloom, has entered the 2006 SEO World Championship!
Because we receive so many SEO related questions, we decided that, while Michael is flexing his SEO muscles in an international competition, we would pass on as much of his skill, and knowledge to you as possible.
So please join us in cheering for the home team in this SEO contest, and pick up some valuable SEO tips and tricks to help with your own website!
You will be able to follow their progress from here at our ShopTalk Weekly blog, or from the contest site itself at http://www.ambatchdotcom-seocontest.ca.
If you would like to support Michael and Matt in the SEO Competition, the best possible help would be to offer a link from your websites to their contest page with the keyword in the linking text. We have provided the necessary code here to make it easy…
Simply copy the contents in the box below and paste them into your websites wherever you would like the link to appear. Thank You for your Support.
Text Link:
More about the contest:
What:
The 2006 World Seo Championship SEOcontest
Who:
Michael Valiant & Matt Bloom; supported by 1ShoppingCart.com
When:
July 14 – October 20
What’s an SEO Contest?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is the act of optimizing your webpage so it ranks as highly as possible in the Search Engines. The better your site ranks, the more people will see it when searching for relevant keywords.
An SEO Contest is a competition to achieve the number 1 rank in a search engine (Google in this case) within a certain time frame (3 months in this case).
How does an SEO Contest work?
The SEO Contest host chooses a keyword that has zero traffic in the chosen search engine. This prevents anyone from getting an early advantage in the contest if they already have a site optimized for that keyword.
Other than that, there are very few rules. Any type of SEO is acceptable, white hat, black hat (link to our glossary page) or otherwise.
What keyword did the World SEO Championship choose?
The selected keyword is Ambatchdotcom SEOContest.
There were no results for this keyword in Google on July 14th.
There were just under 250 results when we officially joined on the 16th and over 55,000 when our site was ready to go live on the 19th.
Today (8/15/2006) there are almost 800,000 results if you type Ambatchdotcom SEOContest into Google.
How are you doing in the competition?
We joined on the 19th of July, 5 days after the competition started. Within four days we were in position 24 and by the end of the first week we were in the top 10.
While we ran into some server problems that dropped us back down to position 20 or so for half a week, we have overcome these issues and fought our way back to position 4. Over the past month and a half, we fluctuated between position 3 and 5, so far unable to break the top two (but don’t count us out yet!)
Our ‘high-water’ mark so far is position 3.
What is your Game Plan?
While the rules of the contest allow for an ‘anything goes’ type of competition, we have decided to take the high road. 
While it is common (and many of our competitors are doing this) to try and win SEO contests with blogs full of keyword spam that don’t make any sense to the casual viewer or web surfer, we truly believe that SEO is useless if you can’t boost a functional website to the top of the search engines.
We will not use anything that could be considered Black Hat, although, in the spirit of the contest we have and will use some techniques that many may consider borderline.
What is Your Goal?
Besides the obvious goal of taking one of the top three spots in the competition, our over-riding goal is to optimizing our website to rank well in Google for the keyword Ambatchdotcom SEOContest’, while still providing a useful service for people who may come across it. As I have already mentioned, we don’t believe a garbage, keyword stuffed webpage serves any purpose outside the obvious short term benefits you may see in a contest like this.
Instead, we are in the process of developing ambatchdotcom-seocontest.ca into a content rich, resource heavy, useful, SERP-climbing machine that should be equally functional to our visitors as it will for us! Features that we are working on include:
Why are you doing this?
Fame, Honour, Glory…
Oh, and there are prizes!
But really we just thought it would be fun. This contest has provided us with an opportunity to stretch our wings and test our knowledge and know-how at an International venue.
You Mentioned Prizes?
There will be small monthly prizes offered to the webmasters & SEOs who take the top 3 positions in Google for the keyword Ambatchdotcom SEOContest, and larger cash prizes on October 20 for the final top 3!
Final Prizes:
1st Prize (The Highest Ranking) – US $ 4,000 & a Crystal Trophy
2nd Prize (Second Highest Ranking) – US $ 2,000
3rd Prize (Third Highest ranking) – US $ 500
All three positions earn bragging rights!
Apparently there are some added incentives for 1st place, like an interview, and possibly an ebook deal or some-such with profit sharing yadda yadda…
For more information, visit the 2006 World SEO Championship homesite ()
Monthly Prizes:
31 July 2006 (mid night EST)
1st Ranking - $200
2nd Ranking - $100
3rd Ranking - $50
31 August 2006 (mid night EST)
1st Ranking - $200
2nd Ranking - $100
3rd Ranking - $50
30 September 2006 (mid night EST)
1st Ranking - $200
2nd Ranking - $100
3rd Ranking - $50
Value to You, Our Merchants, as We Pass Along Our Findings:
Priceless!
Wish us luck!
SEO/SEM & Testing & Tracking & Staff Corner & Tools & Tips & Inside Scoop 17 Aug 2006 02:01 pm
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October 11th, 2006 at 7:06 pm
Why don’t you help everyone out by providing reciprocal links? There are other ways to insure your top SEO spot as well.
December 23rd, 2006 at 7:44 pm
All is class, nothing should be changed.