San Diego Based Search Engine Optimization Specialist Wins Prestigious International Contest

May 7, 2007; 09:25 AM
One of the most awaited Search Engine Optimization contests has ended last week. The SEO World Championship organized by the publicly traded Swedish company, EastPoint(Getupdated). With the participation of probably a thousand SEO professionals worldwide, include noticeable entries from United States, Sweden, France, Italy Portugal, Philippines, India and several more countries all over the world. The competitor that was victorious in this SEO competition is an SEO expert based in San Diego, California.

The objective of the contest was to have the highest ranked website for the phrase: globalwarming awareness2007 on Google Yahoo and MSN/Live Search only considering in the scoring process first page results. The following prizes were awarded to these winners:

1st place: Brand new Citroen C2 car - Benj Arriola (USA/Philippines)
goglobalwarmingawareness2007.com

2nd place: Caribbean Cruise - Fredrik Eriksson (Sweden)
eglobalwarmingawareness2007.com

3rd place: Plasma TV - Abhilash Pillai (India)
globalwarming-awareness2007blog.com

4th place: $500 - Jose Proenca (Portugal)
globalwarming-awareness2007online.com

5th place: $100 - Otto "The Buzz Driver" (France)
ecoloband.com

The overall winner, Benj Arriola, a search engine marketing specialist for 3 years started a career in web design and development in 1997 and moved over to SEO starting 2004 learning the ins and outs of Search Engine Marketing. When we asked him his strategy in winning the international SEO competition, he gave us surprising answers on what he informally calls "indirect SEO" as we spoke with him at a San Diego coffee shop. He gave us four points on what he did to win the contest.

"1. Design helps in SEO - A cheap looking design, filled with ads, or just does not look nice at all; don't expect people to link to it all either. Sometimes even your best friend might decline to link to your site if it looks awful. A good design that looks more credible and can help in the link bait process.

2. Content is still king - Having good content does not necessarily mean Google is actually reading the content and says it's good thus ranks you higher. Having good content makes people read it and like it more. And thus again, helps in the link bait process and will probably encourage people to pass it on to others.

3. Social Media Optimization - Having a bunch of links from social bookmarking and social networking sites does not necessarily mean those links will give you an instant boost in ranking. But It will give you more ways to promote your site to other people. And if you have a good design and good content, then they just might promote it to even more people, which again lead to more effective link baiting.

4. The Internet is a big social network - It does not matter if you are using a social networking site or not, the whole internet is a social network. The more people you have acquaintances with and the more people you help out, the more people you get to help you. It does not matter how you do it, instant messaging, forums, email groups, social networks, as long as you get in touch with the right people and make a connection, they can be potential people that will help you out. Be generous in helping others as you will not find it that hard for others to help you when in need."

As the San Diego based Filipino SEO Professional has put it, it seems it all boiled down to link baiting, but was mainly driven by design, content, social media and personal acquaintances. Getting natural links from other websites linking to your website is one of the known factors that help in the ranking process.

With competitors from all over the world with 2.5 million webpages in the search results and a rough estimate of about 1,000 competitors in the contest from all over the world, it was from San Diego, California, USA that had the best Search Engine Optimization specialist in the whole world. Benj Arriola has been a San Diego resident since July 2004 when he first moved over to the United States after spending his education life and some working experience in the Philippines where he grew up. As Benj is still in close contact with his home country and participates often in the forums of SEO Philippines, he confesses that all his SEO knowledge was home grown in San Diego, CA where he started to do SEO work.