How to SEO your site: Episode 5 - Competitions as an SEO tool
As with the last episode, proper SEO analysts wouldn't dare refer to running a competition as an SEO tool - but as I said last time, I'm not a proper SEO analyst. I'm just someone who lives in the 'real' world of blogging and I think there's more to improving your natural SEO than we looked at in the first couple of episodses. So how could running a competition possibly improve your natural SEO?
How can a competition help my natural SEO?
If you have an attractive price that requires a token gesture on the part of the user, then you should get a good number of entrants (with sufficient promotion). The trick is offering some level of incentive to the user to talk about your competition - thus sending it viral.
The most obvious means of doing so is making the users create a blog post about the competition as their entry into it; although there are pitfalls with doing so (discussed later). This means that you have a faux-viral campaign running because you increase your exposure exponentially; the entrant's blog should have readers, some of whom will also blog about it to enter, blah, blah, etc, etc and before you know it you have a LOT of entrants.
Remember rule #1: backlinks = SEO
Lots of backlinks are good in SEO terms and while you can't make sure that everyone who links back to you is within your niche (thus increasing the relevancy of your backlinks), it's more likely in that you operate in the same niche as your readers. Your readers' readers should also be within that niche (or a chinese-whisper of it) and therefore the backlinks shouldn't be too random (on the most part).
How to make a good competition to improve your SEO
You need something desirable; a couple of Nintendo Wii's and an iPhone would attract sufficient attention. Although desirability is subjective and something that is often adjustable depending on your demographic - but you get the general idea. I recommend getting users to enter the competition by creating a blog post about it; this removes the element of chance from the creation of backlinks.
Further improvements could be offering referal codes to users; giving them more entries for the more users they refer who also enter the competition. The benefit of doing this is that you're leveraging your users to heavily promote your competition under the premise that they stand to benefit from it. So if you get a big player on board it could make the difference between them giving you a minimum-effort post and promoting it heavily (thus giving you a few thousand more entries (backlinks too).
The pitfalls
Heavyweight pro-blogger John Chow highlighted the biggest problem with leveraging your SEO in a militant way using the competition idea. He kept running competitions where you could win fabulous prizes, all you needed to do was link back to his site using the text make money online; this meant he received thousands of links referring to his site using the keyphrase "make money online", thus making him the #1 result on Google for the term. This is known as gaming the search engine and they don't take it very lightly. Infact he got banned for doing it. Banned from Google - now that's a big hit that most bloggers wouldn't be able to take.
Avoiding the pitfalls
So that doesn't mean that the concept is flawed but you cannot specify the terms upon which the users link back to your site - because Google will see this as you gaming their system. Instead you should specify terms like the length of the post (minimum 300 words, for example) and that it must be on a blog with more than [x] posts. This means that you're not getting users make a token 5 word post about your competition purely to enter - you get a meaningful piece of content for the search engines to get their spiders around and add weight to the backlink.
Promoting your competition
It might be worth sending a few choice people an email letting them know that the competition exists and offering them 5 entries just for blogging about it (or something else tasty in return). It's not easy getting the word out sometimes and ultimately it might be easier doing this than buying a bundle of ReviewMe or PayPerPost reviews.
So there you have it, if done the right way with the right prize a competition can be a powerful tool. In SEO terms you can get a lot of backlinks - but you could leverage it differently if you wished. I've seen some competitions that required you to sign up to an RSS feed to enter, or just leave a comment. But seeing as this is an SEO guide, backlinks are key. In episode six we'll be looking at PPC campaigns as a way of SEO'ing your site.
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