For those of you that are not aware www.seonoobs.com started an seo contest on the 4th of February where a search result that returns 0 results was given to entrants. This term was “Yicrosoft Directory” – presumably because of the buzz around Microsoft bidding for Yahoo.

The keyword phrase was given at around 2am GMT (which I had no intention to stay up for). I will just break down what my initial process was; which might provide insight for some and be a gentle read for experienced seoers.

I initially looked for a domain with the keywords “Yicrosoft Directory” included, as predicted all .com’s .net’s etc had been taken. I finally settled with the domain www.yicrosoft-directory-online.com which is easy to remember and contains the important keywords.

Unfortunately the day I did this, my server was compromised and all my sites went down for 72 hours. Undeterred by this I decided to register a “free” domain from Wordpress. I created a nice looking blog, posted around 8 posts based on the keyword, generated some links etc – the gods seemed against me however and Wordpress deleted all “Yicrosoft Directory” additions, including mine. Disheartened by this I decided to drop out of the contest, bowing down gracefully.

More than anything it was a nice opportunity to look at how Google reacts to different seo techniques from the start, instead of working on a site that already ranks or returns around 12 million indexed results.

Then last week I decided to look at Google’s rankings of my previous competitors – to my surprise my original .com was ranked around number 15, not bad considering I had done absolutely nothing. The domain name itself appeared to carry a lot of weight!

Anyway, I have been link building and I made one post, installed a Wordpress blog, chose a design, optimised it best I could and sat back. There is around one week left and I am now ranked 3rd overall, out of about 24 contestants, if I win I will be surprised as other contestants have had a good 14 day head start over me. I will also post an in depth process of how I tackled this contest when the competition ends, good luck the other contestants, home stretch now!

Visit my Yicrosoft Directory entry