Do you know why I always give time to participate small to big time SEO competition despite the win is not predictable and the waste of time is inevitable, like the Busby SEO Test and the others? It is because I’ve seen some real benefits that it can give to your website. Specially if the key phrase or key word that is targetted by the contestants are related to the theme of the site. Actually even it is not relevant at all, there’s a benefit that a website can gain. One is it increases the backlinks of the site specially if the method use to rank the site is a white hat method. This will make your site increase its strength on search engines.
Another thing that I like about this kind of competition is that the excitement it brings. You will feel the rush of blood specially if you see that your site is ranking well for the keyword. It is also an opportunity for you to test several SEO methods before actually trying it to your actual clients. The problem however is if you overdo it and causes your website to be banned by the search engines. However, it will be avoided if you will just use non-spamming methods and too fast non consistent link building process that will be seen by Google or other SE as not a natural phenomena on their indexes.
Well, try joining SEO contests later and don’t forget to learn from it!
You have said the benefits of SEO contests clearly. I am a participant in many SEO contest and I become the runner up in “Review on RefererX” contest. I really enjoy participating in SEO contests.