How did I maintain the top spot for a specific keyword?

For those who are asking and are interested to know how did I reach and maintain the top spot (second to macuha.com) for two weeks on the keyword “Marhgil Macuha” in his last mini-SEO contest, here are the answers:

1. It’s pure teamwork. We, Winston of batangyagit.com and I, built homepage backlinks from our network of high quality blogs. We have 1 PR7 blog, 5 PR6 blogs, 10 PR5 blogs, 34 PR4 blogs, 8 PR3, blogs, 13 PR2 blogs, and the rest are PR1 domains.

2. VOX and i.PH Booster. Additional backlinks from i.ph and vox blogs also helped us maintain the top spot. We have a lot of friends from i.PH and VOX and we asked them to link us in their new posts. VOX.com and i.PH pings google and technorati instantly after posting an article with back links.
(But be careful in posting your links to new blogs, because Google might consider your blog a spam blog. Just link moderately)

3. Forum signatures. I have several online community accounts (e.g.: sitepoint, digital point, asp.net, dost-sei, and phpbb), I changed all my signature anchor text to Marhgil Macuha and pointed it to my entry post. If you have more than 1000+ posts, you’ll have more than 1000 links. I also asked Mikko of conradmiguel.com to change his signature links, use the contest keyword, and point it to my post.

4. Links from Co-bloggers. I asked back links from Oliver Robillo, Isis Lahora, Mark Aethen Agana, Paolo Mendoza, Annabel Callos Choy, Alexandra Siaco, Ryan Pacabis, Jemme Putchir, Ariel Lalisan, Michael Ray Barcelon, Ruben Corral, Vicent Jon Camba, Sidney de la Cruz, and Andrew dela Serna. (For the mentioned names, just google the respective names and you’ll find their blogs.)

5. And.. there’s no number 5. That’s all we did to make it to the top. If only we are aware of that bookmarking thing, our entry would probably be unbeatable. Heehee…

What is the correct way of linking? This is the question that was asked to me so many times. All you need to do is link your post using the keyword you want to rank in different search engines. For example, you want to rank for the keyword “Adobe Recipe“. You should create a link to your blog or blog post (from another blog or website) using that keyword. That’s it! You’re doing SEO.