Programming and SEO are different word and have different line of sight in the cyberspace. Programming solves the problem of companies and making their job easier. SEO or search engine optimization on the other hand is a way of promoting companies or themselves over the internet through the use of search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN and other known search engine on the net. Their combination is promising since you can use your programming skills to understand the algorithm behind the different calculation made by those search engines on ranking your websites on the top of the ladder. While SEO can be used to market your developed software so that it has a high visibility on the cyberspace.
The usual method used by big companies world wide to easily conduct a self-promotion challenge is a SEO contests. In SEO competition every participants are required to provide link back to the promoted site while gaining traffic because of the continuous check up of the entrants on the leaderboard or result of the contest in daily basis. Some of the popular or known challenge in the history of world wide competition is the challenge from UK Webmaster World which requires masters of optimizations to top on the rank on Google via keyword: SEOCONTEST2008 and the current challenge which is to optimized a new keyword called: kabonfootprint. Aside from that company, last June 1 Busby Web Solutions also initiated a world cup competition with a goal of optimizing the keyword Busby SEO Challenge. (I actually join the said competition using the http://www.bleuken.com and http://kabonfootprint.bleuken.com websites but unluckily I was not able to manage to conquer the said competitions)
The method of programming and SEO are different but the technique and attitude to be applied to excel the said fields are all the same. You need a lot of patient and determination to fulfill all the task underlying on them.
