All you got to do is maximize your search engine traffic and you will be in the competition. This week I am lagging behind.. So a lot of work need to be done.

Congrats to the Top 5..

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But I would like to share it: Any blogger with weekly traffic of let’s say 10 needs to achieve 10 more to get 100% gain.

I must be knowing the terms for those 10 existing searches. If I search for those exact terms during the week, and visit my own blog – it would be anyways counted as a search visit. Sounds very simple to me for small blogs.

Of course even good traffic blogs (like 100+) can also do the same, but they would not be able to achieve anything like that very easily unless they have all time in hand to just to do it all day.

Thanks for your votes. 24 out of 32 replied to my survey mail. See the results below:

RajaieTalks.com – 10
Read2Know.com – 5
MelvinBlog.com – 5
Ardi.Web.Id – 5
Homebiz.bukiki.com – 10
BlogginKid.com – Nothing selected
MillionClues.com – 10
Techzoomin.com – 10
Technotip.org – 10
TechnoSamrat.com – 40
BlogBucks.net – 10
Nela.in – Any value is fine
VelvetBlues.com – 20
DomainMarvelous.com – 10
Otooo.com – 10
Geek-Speak.co.uk – 10
BloggingFromHome.com – 10
LifeIsColourful.com – 10
ThouShallBlog.com – 10
TechVivo.com – 40
HoxfulMonsters.com – 10
BEFolks.com – 10
TechPP.com – 15
MadWorldWii.com – 10

10 – 15 votes
5 – 3 votes
40 – 2 vote
20 – 1 vote
15 – 1 vote
None selected – 1 vote
Any value is fine – 1 vote

We are going with the majority. i.e. 10. Thank you all for your coopearation. We still have more than four weeks to go and hence everybody (small, large, old, new…) has a chance to improve search visits.

Good luck!

@Hussein, Not really, we are trying to fix the problem so that nobody can easily get away with it

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Let the survey begin.

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My 2 cents of thought. What you choose is fine with me. I am really here to participate and encourage you more than anything. Winning is good, but not everything… Its not really the end of the world as some seem to think. Whatever happened to the spirit of participation? Blogs used to be a place where you put your points/views/thoughts across. Now they have become a means to making money, that’s all. Very sad to say and see!

So we have to decide the base for calculating the % increase ASAP. If that cannot be arrived at in the next two-three days, it will stay the way it is now.

In the future I will stay away from conducting such competitions as most people just want lottery based dumb contests. I had a chance to improve my RSS count to 500 or so if I had offered all these prizes in contests. But I thought we had a great chance to learn SEO from each other via this competition and improve search traffic. The amount of criticism I am facing because of the need to share Google Analytics a/c is even more

I shall send a survey email tonight to all participants to choose a base value. And we will stick to the majority’s opinion…

I find this discussion a bit frustrating and unnecessary distraction in any contest. Now, for what to do. One option is to stop the contest, set the rules and reopen. If not, my suggestion is as follows:
First a base of 10 is still very hard for low count blogs to achieve (500%?) when compared to larger blogs that have high SEO rankings already. So why handicap the smaller ones even more? They have to take monumental steps to go that distance in such a short time frame… Okay, if you want to change the rules, then divide the field into two or three groups based on current search starting point. Then award a top prize to each sector and maybe one overall — like Olympic trials leading up to the big one. Let’s settle this and stop messing around. Competitors need to know what they are up against to plan their efforts.

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As for at the contest rules goes, I agree with TechnoSamrat’s view below.

“We need to take into account the increase in number of hits, domain age and also the % number of increase in hits. we can add all the three factors to the score card..”

We already have the no. of hits and % no.of increase in hits with Google Analytics. The only thing we need is the domain age. We can get this from any PR sites.
What do you say Ajith?

@Nihar, Thanks for the congrats!

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The best solution would be to divide the blogs into 3 categories.. traffic less than 100.. traffic between 100 and 500, traffic above 500… Then we can decide the winner from among the three top ones in each category….

Thanks,
samrat

@ Ajith, unless we set up a tier system it would be impossible (almost) to make it a fair standing at the Small/new v Big/old sites.

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