How Competitions Affect SEO Perceptions - An SEO Challenge?

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First, Google bombing competitions are what the initiators might call a “Google Test,” “SEO Challenge,” “SEO Competition,” and so forth. The idea is to take a search query (i.e. term or phrase), which at the time of the competition’s announcement, returns either no results (i.e. “Your search did not match any documents”), or results that are going to be very easy to beat. This sterile search results space is now a good starting point for competitors to start their optimization race. At a specified pre-set date and time, the judges of the competition search for the targeted phrase and Google SERPs define the order of placement winners (first place winner, second place winner, and so forth).

Google Bombing Competitions Deliver the Wrong Message

The first reason that I don’t like such competitions is that they give the field of SEO a bad name. Search marketing is the primary driver for the growing Internet advertising market. It is a sophisticated field that requires a combination of technical and Web marketing knowledge, skills and most importantly - experience.

In the real world where competitive market players are operating, SEO is not a practice to hack Google by simply fiddling around with on-copy optimization techniques (reminder: don’t you love it when people ask you if a website can be pushed to the top by simply stuffing some keywords into the Meta tag…!?!). Google bombing competitions deliver the wrong message to people outside the community, including potential clients and stakeholders, that Google can be pretty easily hacked in order to quickly achieve top rankings for any website within any market. That message is far from the truth.

Professionals search marketers today already know that SEO and search marketing as a whole is only one small (and critical) part of the sales and/or relationship-building chain. It is only part of the lead generation link in the chain. Why only part of a link and not an entire link? Well, would you contact a business after landing on its website following a click on a search engine result, only to find out that the content of the site is not to your satisfactory? That the company seems unreliable? That you find it really irritating to navigate and find the information you are seeking for? If your answer is "no," then it means that the other side has just lost a lead. Hence, in this case, the lead generation link in the chain is broken.

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Comments On: How Competitions Affect SEO Perceptions

· What a load of nonsense. Competitions are fun and throw-away.If the SEOs are the...    · If you don't like them don't participate. You sound like a sore loser or something....    · Dude, have a sense of humor or very few people will want to hire a jerk like you. I...    · What are you doing, trying to get a job at WMW? That's the holier than though...   >>> Post your comment now!