Who Won the Ted Leonsis SEO Contest?

I didn't win the Ted Leonsis SEO Contest. I didn't win $500 for Blackbear United Football Club. Looks like I came in second place, but there's no cash prize for that. Hopefully, participating has helped bring a little more exposure for Blackbear United's youth development program. Since I joined the contest late, I was actually quite pleased to finish in the top 10 on Google. Right now, my Squidoo page ranks #9. Must have been higher on Christmas Eve. Last time I checked it was at #7. One of my kids was sick on Christmas Eve and I spent the evening with her and a bucket. I completely forgot about the SEO contest. Did anyone take a snapshot of the Ted Leonsis SERP at the end of the contest?

I'd like to thank the following people for helping me with this contest:

• Gary Korn of Maine.info
• Deborah Bailey of Barnstormer Design Group
• Jeremy Chatfield of Merjis Internet Marketing
  
• Ian Feaveryear of Adwords for Profit
  
• Marc Pichik of Retract-A-Gate
• MJ Ball of Blackbear United

I opted to use a Squidoo page for my entry in the contest because I knew it could rank quicker than a page on my firm's site. This turned out to be a good strategy. So, thanks Squidoo! My site's currently getting the dreaded "Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.apogee-web-consulting.com" when doing an info: search. And, no, Google's webmaster central tools tell me everything is fine. It tells me, "Pages from your site are included in Google's index." That's true, a site: search shows that, but something's broken. Either Google has a bug and the "info:" command is broken or else Google's webmaster central has a bug and is telling me everything is fine when it's not. Either way, this is a bit peculiar.

One beneficial side effect of participating in this SEO contest is that I've found some interesting SEO bloggers that were discussing the contest and have subscribed to their feeds. Some I knew about and others are brand new to me. They are: Graywolf's SEO Blog, Scoreboard Media Group, Stuntdubl, Johnon and Caydel's SEO Blog.

Technorati tags: ted leonsis, seo contest, search engine optimization, maine soccer