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The Contest ended on October 20th 2006 and this entry placed 4th in the contest.

 

This was the official Lisa Campbell (KDM) Entry in the World Championship SEO contest sponsored by Ambatch. Keyphrase - "Ambatchdotcom Seocontest" of 2006

I am Lisa Campbell and this is my entry in the Ambatchdotcom Seocontest.

To my knowledge, I am the only female participant in this Ambatchdotcom SEOcontest.

Although I have never given my gender much consideration with regards to Ambatchdotcom-Seocontest, I now have to wonder where all the other women are?  If you're out there.. please let me know so I can quit saying I'm the only woman in the Ambatchdotcom-Seocontest!

World SEO Championship

This ambatch.com for the world SEO Championship contest has been an interesting learning experience.  Early on in the seo contest, another contest participant left a comment on my ambatchdotcom seocontest blog to the effect that he didn't feel that there was anything to be learned from participating in an seo contest.  Unfortunately, at one point in the contest I lost my entire ambatchdotcom database and the comment is lost so that is a paraphrase of his actual words.

Search Engine Competition

At the time, I was unsure how much truth there was to his comment but with less than 3 weeks left in the SEO contest I am quite sure that he was wrong.

These are some of the things I have learned from this Ambatchdotcom SEOcontest.

Domain name Structure and SEO for Ambatchdotcom Seocontest.

In the real SEO world in which one competes on a daily ongoing basis with other websites for top SERPs, having a domain name with your target keyword or keyphrase in it isn't always feasible but it is something I believe should be aimed for.  It won't guarantee a top position but it's a step in the right direction to get there.

This is not to say that if you are targeting 10 different words that you should string them all together in a domain name but if you can pick one relevant word or phrase that will be all encompassing of the general theme of your site then it would be wise to aim for that.

"In practicing the art of SEO, we must always keep in mind that ambatchdotcom and SEO contests aside, web sites exist for the human visitors, not the search engines.  The balance must be to have a good quality web site that humans will want to visit and optomize it for the search engines so that the people are able to find it." Lisa Campbell, Ambatchdotcom Seocontest Participant

SEOContest

On the other hand, when participating in a SEOcontest, it's a good way to get a fast start and in all likelihood, it will keep you up if you can keep it up with fresh quality content.  In the case of this site, the best of the "ambatchdotcom seocontest " domains were taken by the time I got here so I tried a couple of variations on the theme and finally came up with the current domain ambatch-dotcom-seocontest.com. Of course, later on I came up with the idea to use ambatchdotcomandseocontest.com which probably would have been brilliant since "and" doesn't compute with the search engines it would probably have been read like a space - but, by that time I had already invested a lot of time and, yes, money, into promoting this domain and did not want to split my resources so, while ambatchdotcomandseocontest.com got up to about number 20 in the SERPs without promotion, it fell from there and without help, it pretty much withered and died.

SEO and Ambatch

There's no news here.  Backlinks have always been the key to ranking well in Google and SEO is no different for Ambatch. The challenge is determining what is 'related'.  When you have a term like "ambatchdotcom seocontest" that means nothing and is related to nothing, it's difficult to determine a relationship.

Search Engine Optimization

For this SEO contest I chose to focus on the contest and on SEO so whenever possible I targeted contest sites for links and other SEO sites and blogs. However, my opinion is that in a short duration contest like the "ambatchdotcom seocontest", it is the quantity and quality of the links and not the relationship between the sites isn't as important as it would be if the contest were 6 months or a year in duration.

However, it is always important to build your relationships slowly.  Ambatchdotcom seocontest results don't take kindly to the immidiate aquisition of thousands of links, no matter how good it sounds, it's better to move slow and steady.

In a real life scenario, be aggressive in obtaining links that are related to your site or theme.  Work with other webmasters and try to get people to mention your site in a blog entry or add a link to a relevant page but again, slow and steady.

This is one area in which ambatchdotcom seocontest and real world SEO are evenly matched.  The web loves fresh content and it doesn't matter if your site is 1 month, 1 year or 10 years old.  Providing fresh content will keep the spiders crawling and after all, that is how the web spins.

Keyword and Keyphrase density for Ambatchdotcom Seocontest:

In looking at the top few results in google for ambatchdotcom seocontest these are the keyword density results;

My entry:(#3) keyword analysis

For "Ambatchdotcom Seocontest"

Title: 1: 2: 50%
Body: 77: 2644: 2.9%
H1/H2/H3: 5: 64: 7.8%
Links: 26: 191: 13.6%
Bold: 6: 86: 7%
Meta description: 2: 20: 10%
Meta keywords: 2: 15: 13.3%

1st ranking entry keyword analysis:

For "Ambatchdotcom Seocontest"

Meta keywords: 1: 6: 16.7%
Title: 1: 2: 50%
Body: 68: 2160: 3.1%
H1/H2/H3: 12: 77: 15.6%
Links: 21: 113: 18.6%
Bold: 4: 9: 44.4%
Meta description: 1: 8: 12.5%

2nd ranking entry keyword analysis:

For "Ambatchdotcom Seocontest"

Title: 1: 2: 50%
Body: 42: 1259: 3.3%
H1/H2/H3: 6: 65: 9.2%
Links: 31: 202: 15.3%
Bold: 4: 41: 9.8%
Meta description: n/a: n/a: n/a
Meta keywords: n/a: n/a: n/a

As I've been collecting the ambatchdotcom seocontest density statistics, I've been trying to bring this entry's density for ambatchdotcom seocontest in line with the ambatchdotcom seocontest entries ranking 1st and 2nd in the seo contest.  To me it is unnatural to write ambatchdotcom seocontest so many times in one page but that's the ambatchdotcom seocontest for you.  The goal is to rank #1 and that's my intention.. so... ambatchdotcom seocontest to you too!

Draw your own conclusions.

Ambatchdotcom coming to a close for the seocontest.

This Ambatchdotcom Seocontest has been a learning experience.  It has validated what I thought I knew about search engine optimization and taught me new things about participating in an SEO contest.

I'm not sure I would enter another SEO contest.  It is time consuming and stressful.  The ambatchdotcom seocontest took me away from other sites I have been developing and my older sites have been neglected as well.

So, as the final push comes in the last 19 days of the ambatchdotcom seocontest I will be attempting to pull ahead a spot or 2 by October 20th but I'll be glad when it's over.

No matter how this turns out for me, 'ambatchdotcom seocontest' will be a phrase that I not soon forget but it's now time to get back to work on my other projects.

As a side note , I was recently asked about my ambatchdotcom seocontest entry and about the seo contest in general.  This was my response to the question.

"In this ambatchdotcom seocontest it seems that the domain name + backlinks + content is what does it but judging from the other entries, it's not backlinks alone.. there are several participants that have thousands of backlinks and had them early on and still didn't make it to the top 3, some not even to the top ten! Another seo contest entrant was dancing between 2 and three with me for a long time but then dropped down to around #8 and has pretty much stayed there but he has quite a number of backlinks.. spamming penalty maybe?

I'm the only person in the top ten results for ambatchdotcom seocontest that doesn't have a domain name with 'ambatchdotcom seocontest' in it but I think that's a high factor, especially early on in the contest. But some of the contests specifically say you can't use a domain name with the keyword in it.

Pr doesn't seem to be a real factor in the ambatchdotcom seocontest, I had a useless domain with pr2 so I seo'd it for the ambatchdotcom seocontest and changed the content to ambatchdotcom seocontest content but didn't get many backlinks to it and it's ranking around #84. If pr was a factor, it should have been higher, even without the backlinks.

Ambatchdotcom seocontest Content, well, I do think content has something to do with it. Fresh content that is. I don't think it matters much what the content is as long as there is a reasonable amount of the ambatchdotcom seocontest keyphrase in it.

Most people were writing about the seocontest but I'm not sure google is able to determine what relevant is with a word that doesn't mean anything. If the contest were longer, I think that a pattern would develop and google would decide what was relevant and what wasn't. Take a look at http://ambatchdotcomandseocontest.net - it's mine too I wanted to see what would happen with a free hosting domain and gibberish for content - it's 109

ok so important factors in the ambatchdotcom seocontest in my opinion...

1. backlinks but no spamming (don't get them too quickly)
2. keywords in the domain name
3. use a blogger account if it's permitted (there's no real good reason for the guy in the number 1 spot to be in the number one spot except the blogger domain with the keywords in it)
4. content - just fresh with a good number of keywords in it. use the h1, h2, h3 tags and make sure your keywords are in it. It seems that if you update about every 3 or 4 days it's good.
5. google sitemaps

about meta tags... I don't know, I took all of mine out for a while and I didn't budge from my position. Then I put them all back and still no change - some people are using them, some not.

I built my site like a real site. I plan to use it to demonstrate my abilities but I wanted it to look like a site that a business might have - not just a blog with a bunch of nonsense in it ;-)

Ask me again at the end of the contest, my views might change but this is what I believe so far."

As it turns out, the person asking the question was genuinely interested in my ambatchdotcom seocontest strategy.  I had thought he was perhaps doing his own research so he could enter a contest himself (a little late for ambatchdotcom seocontest) but, while I did not ask to confirm with him his motivation for inquiring about my ambatchdotcom seocontest entry, I believe now that while his initial interest was not likely so that he could help me, that is in fact what he did.  He offered some great suggestions and insight for my ambatchdotcom seocontest entry that I hadn't thought of and also confirmed some of my SEOcontest ideas.  So, When this is all over, there will be credit to him here.