Search Engine Marketing Specialist from the Philippines wins the first SEO World Championship and drives home a new car winning the top spot. The worldwide contest was organized by Eastpoint (Getupdated).

Manila, Philippines May 3, 2007 — A Search Engine Marketing Specialist from the Philippines wins the first SEO World Championship and drives home a new car winning the top spot. The worldwide contest was organized by Eastpoint (Getupdated).

Internet marketing firm Eastpoint (Getupdated) created the most prestigious international competition in the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) known as the “SEO World Championship” that started last January 15, 2007 and has concluded May 1, 2007 at 6:00pm Eastern Standard Time. Official winners were announced 24 hours after the contest ended.

Although there was several other popular previous SEO contest, Eastpoint (Getupdated) has differentiated from the others for holding the largest by far SEO competition to date. Where the top prizes were a Citroen C2 car, a Caribbean cruise and a plasma TV for the top 3 spots in the contest. Not only did they have the largest prizes, but they had one of the most competitive contest as well since only first page results on all 3 major search engines namely: Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live Search were given scores and second page results were not even considered.

Benj Arriola, a Search Engine Marketing Specialist for 3 years was a former chemist in his early career life before moving on to web design and development in 1998, emerged as the victorious competitor with his entry that bested about and estimate of 2.5 million web pages index in search engines.

Benj Arriola, who grew a majority of his life in the Philippines, has moved to the United States in 2004 in seek of greener pastures and has moves into the world of SEO. Given a good technical background with some basic common-sense marketing experience, Benj has quickly moved into the SEO world being one of the major personalities in the online community SEOPhilippines.

When we asked Benj what was his secret to his success in this SEO contest, he had 3 points to say:

1. Content is still king! Good content keep people stay, comeback and spread the news in a natural manner.
2. Design is still important, not that is has to be really superb, but at least it does not look bad that people will not trust you nor the content of your website. Make it clean and presentable to help drive more traffic, world-of-mouth and more effective website link baiting.
3. And SEO is a pay-it-forward type of industry. The more help you give out to other people, the more help you receive when you need it.

Benj Arriola then states in his personal blog: “SEO contest is a test of one’s skill to rank for a certain keyphrase in search engines. But the real SEO work is really much more than that. I happy I was able to showcase my skills in this contest and was victorious, but I have high respect for all the other competitors since it was not an easy win. I was still worried and nervous up to the last minute of a come-from-behind win from the other competitors. I would like to add that 20% of my efforts in winning this contest were through the help of the many SEO professionals in the Philippines. This win is not completely my win. It is a win of SEOPhilippines. Where competent and skilled SEO professionals are, SEO professionals in the Philippines have high reliability in off-shore SEO outsourcing.”

SEO or Search Engine Optimization, a subset of Search Engine Marketing, is both the art and science of modifying websites with additional skill in off-page optimization factors in making websites rank higher in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live Search. SEO professionals are sought after Internet marketers as they can help promote a company’s product or service in search engines and the closer they are to the first page of the search results for a targeted keyword, the better visibility and potential sale a website may generate from a highly targeted niche market of choice.

The objective of the SEO World Championship to win was make the highest ranking website on Google, Yahoo and MSN for the keywords: GlobalWarming Awareness2007. Out of about 2.5 Million webpages, Benj Arriola’s winning entry website: www.goglobalwarmingawareness2007.com/ had the highest score with all first page entries on Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live Search Engines.

Other winning websites were:

2nd place - Caribbean Cruise:
eglobalwarmingawareness2007.com

3rd place - Plasma TV
globalwarming-awareness2007blog.com

4th place - $500
globalwarming-awareness2007online.com

5th place - $100
ecoloband.com