Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is crucial for anything you want to do online these days. It is also, usually, one of the most expensive elements for most business. Getting expert SEO advice and learning about SEO in order to do it yourself is a commitment of time and money which most small business owners cannot afford.

This is where Webmaster.com, one of the pre-eminent destinations for webmasters to find expert help and advice, comes in. Webmastereserve.com is a forum frequented by experts in their fields and website owners looking for answers to questions affecting the success of their online business. It is free to join and committed to providing a positive user experience.

This year, Webmasterserve.com partnered up with David Amerland, author of the best-selling ‘SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google’s #1 page” to set up an SEO competition with thousands of pounds in prize money. “SEO is always a big obstacle for webmasters of any kind of experience,” says David Amerland, “knowing where to get advice and being able to trust it is always a big issue. Webmasterserve.com has been the destination of choice for webmasters for some time now and I feel privileged being asked to help with the coordination of their 2011 SEO Competition.”

The purpose of the SEO competition is to help webmasters understand many of the things they need to do in order to help their websites achieve a first page ranking in the Google search engine. Over a period of three months webmasters from all over the world will get the chance to compete against each other on the positioning of their pages over a certain keyword in Google. The first prize is £1,000 which in itself makes it a very attractive proposition but, as David Amerland has pointed out, the real prize is not the money.

“Taking part in an SEO competition like this and getting the chance to learn about some of the practicalities of SEO and troubleshoot a page you are optimizing is an invaluable learning curve. You basically are learning the SEO techniques which are used by the experts and that is the real prize in my mind. Like with any competition there can only be one top winner and a handful of runner-ups, however, because you are learning so many valuable skills on SEO and you have the chance to interact with experts like myself and the others who will be at hand to advise you are taking away with you skills and knowledge you can put to work for you on your website. This is a win-win scenario. No one who takes part in the competition is going to be anything but a winner.”

The Webmasterserve.com SEO competition will run for three months and contenstants can join at any time prior to the four weeks from the closing date. David Amerland will be helping with advice and support as will other expert members of the popular forum. Competition prizes will be in cash and there will be many runner-up prizes too.

Notes to editors

Details for the competition can be obtained by visiting www.webmasterserve.com and becoming a member. There are also details on David Amerland’s website: www.helpmyseo.com.