Greatest Real Estate Agent In The World Contest - A competition for Real Estate SEO supremacy

Or maybe just a little bit of fun :)

My buddy Eric Bramlett who has been really firing it up doing his own SEO lately (He is first and foremost a Realtor - or at least he used to be heh) came up with an idea for a fun contest - the "Greatest Real Estate Agent In The World Contest" (He gets a link because it was his idea - this is NOT my idea and I take no responsibility for the great relationships you may build or the learning you may experience. Also as with any attempts at experimenting with your site to try to rank it - please be sure you are familiar and adhere to Google's Guidelines For Webmasters.

Anyways - what this is, is a good old fashioned SEO contest - We pick a phrase that is not very competitive (So everyone can compete on a reletively equal footing without requiring much authority) - We decided on the phrase "greatest Realtor in the world" (Without quotes) for the phrase however due to wanting to respect the membship mark Realtor and not creating any more dilution for the term, I am going to suggest an ammendment to the phrase - so unless you have a problem with it Eric, I would like to change it to "Greatest real estate agent in the world" contest

We pick a start date (That is right now) and we pick an end date. How about May 1st (That's a holiday isn't it ;))

So here is the deal - this SEO contest is open to anyone and everyone who would like to participate (But really it's mostly for Realtors and their webmasters)

You can use any domain in your control (This also includes sub pages of domains already established such as your REW Blog, squidoo etc) or of course you can use your own site, blog, forum etc

The person controlling the web page highest ranked in Google as determined by a check across multiple data centers will be determined the winner.

You cannot use the word Realtor in a domain or use any other domain that violations the a member mark or other unlawful use of a domain (Feel free to use MLS in the domain all you want though - we are going to dilute that one fo sho!)

And now for my own personal twist - (Again all credit for the contest goes to Eric, send him a link if you think this is a fun idea, it's a nice thank you) -

So here is my twist - As with any good excercise in SEO, in order for it to be more than just fun and for bragging rights, there needs to be the opportunity for the participants to learn - how do you learn? By reverse engineering and observing others - so anyone participating in this contest must provide on "their" entry / competing page, a minimum one paragraph writeup on something they learned / observed on someone else's competing page. Now we don't want this to be a closed loop, I want you all to read and observe (All the time honing your SEO skills) as many pages as you can - so you cannot comment on, or link to any site that is in a reciprocal or 3 way link back to your own site or entry - this way you have to go looking for new techniques you have never found before and must learn to share with others :)

Update! This was confusing when I wrote it and lots of people have asked, so let me clarify with an example.

So let's see - I link over to Eric Blackwell's entry for "Greatest Real Estate Agent In the World" and my writeup would explain what I learned - for instance - I learned that SEO can be a group / organized effort and that the net effect of 10 people working one project may be more postitive than 10 people working on 10 separate projects.

On Erics entry, I see that he links to someone else and they have their writeup about who they learned from.

Now here is where the rule applies - The person that Eric linked to cannot link back to ME as their example this would mean that within three clicks I can close the loop. (I click to Eric, Eric Clicks to someone, someone clicks to me) 3 clicks. Does that make sense?

As a secondary part of the above rule, no rel="nofollow" are allowed. Why you ask? Because I want to help break webmasters of the habit of nofollowing absolutely everything because they are "Afraid" to help the competition, or think they are going to "leak" pagerank or other such nonsense - True linking is about sending your visitors unselfishly to a resource contained elsewhere on the web - in the first part of this rule it states you must "read" and "report" what you learned. If you have read the site and learned from it, then it is trusted site and a resource for others no? So no link condoms.

I probably missed something, but for now - have fun guys and gals - this should be a great way for us all to learn / sharpen our SEO skills, and at the same time connect with some previously unknown peers to help build our SOI even greater.

That's it? What kind of contest doesn't have prizes?

OK Ok - you can have prizes - First place winner receives ummmm lets see - Ok a free REW template website ($740 value) Free hosting for a year on the new V 2.0 REW platform ($480) and throw in our $2500 CORE IDX and the $360 yearly fee on top of it - that works out to ummmm - let's see about $4080 for first place - how's THAT for a prize :)

Prize update: I have actually decided to up the prize to "lifetime" REW platform and IDX hosting (combined $840 USD per year) for the winner.

Btw - if you are not a Realtor, you obviously can't have an IDX, or an REW template, so this offer is completely transferable and will make a great gift to your favorite Realtor.