Wordpress SEO - Joomla SEO - Link Building

Contests make for great SEO! We talked about Hosting Contests to Generate Links earlier and we've seen this work more and more. Here are some ideas to host contests that serve more than one purpose.

 1. Caption contest

Put up a funny picture relevant to your website. Then invite your visitors to log in to your site (there you go, more registered users) and write a caption for that image (more content). Have others vote for the best caption (more user interaction) and then give away something super cool for that audience as prizes (this gets proomted on giveaways sites and usually catches on in twitter, digg, etc. - so more buzz and links!). And the best part? You don't have to offer expensive prizes. Just offer them something that's valuable to them and overstocked with you or a service that's not much of an additional cost to you or your staff.

http://www.tabletennisdb.com/captioncontest/1

 2. Scholarships

Offer scholarships to educational insitutions. Best way to get .edu and .gov links!

http://www.newlookhouston.com/New_Look_Scholarship.html

3. A game widget

Linksys added a slot machine pull to get a free router. I was on that site every day pulling at the slot machine like a crazed person! I even entered their contest newsletter to get notified on ways to get more entries, blah blah. Of course I did not win. But now I'm on their mailing list and I think the next time I need to upgrade my router, Linksys is likely to be the people I will go for. Get the idea?

4. Review contest

This is the oldest one. Ask people to write reviews about your product on their site. This will sure get you awesome relevant links!

There are really infinite ways of doing this and the more creative you get, the better. You know your website audience the best. Get creative and offer a niche contest that you'd want to talk about to your friends. A little bit of creativity and thought can go a long way!