On domains:
You have put your page on a subdomain of an already established, trusted Pagerank 5 domain: startplezier.nl. Nothing wrong with that! It would have been a lot more difficult to obtain good results if you had registered a new domain. It is assumed Google puts new domains in a “sandbox”, a quarantaine period, before letting them weigh high in search results: http://www.webpronews.com/ebusiness/sitepromotion/wpn-3-20040826WhatisTheGoogleSandboxEffect.html

On meta tags:
They’re important because they help you to determine the way your entry is presented in a search results page. But Google ignores meta tags for ranking. And has been doing so for years:
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2167931

I know it’s a bit weird I’m arguing over this since you have won and the winner knows better anyway, but I wanted to at least clarify my points :-) Enjoy the Ipod Shuffle!

I agree this contest is something else than a real SEO for you’re client’s.

I disagree with this conclusion:
- quality is more important than quantity, although quantity doesn’t hurt

I think al backlinks doe mather! You have to find a mix of it. I would say:
quantity: 80%
quality: 20%

I disagree with dis conclusion:
- place your content on an already established domain with a high pagerank, preferably the same TLD as the search query

I started a new startpage.

-some on-page optimization can help, but is not really necessary

I think it is! Most of the people didn’t use META tags. I think is IS necessary to use them. Why shouldn’t you?

only Google knows exactly of course, but my guess would be it is the page that counts, not the site/domain. However, if you have two languages on the same site, you might want to have a look at the internal link structure: for a Dutch-language search query, links from English-language pages will probably count less (and vice versa), so I assume you better have two separated navigational structures per language - but that ’s only natural, unless you assume your entire audience is bilingual!

On lvb.net, English and Dutch link structures are separate, except for the upper navigation. On my English-language blog on the other hand, the site-wide link in the navigation to my sitedeals-released page probably didn’t really help for a Dutch-language query, even when the page itself was (partly) in Dutch.

I had noticed that Google.com results depend on the Accept-Language header sent by the browser (see footnote of a previous comment). On my PC, IE7 sends "nl-be" (the Windows regional settings, even if the browser build en the specified language in IE is English), and Firefox sends "Accept-Language: en-gb,en;q=0.5" (as specified in Tools… options… advanced… edit languages). Results of a "naked" request like http://www.google.com/search?q=sitedeals15+released will depend on this header, but if you add a parameter "hl=" for the interface language, you should be able to control the results: http://www.google.com/search?hl=nl&q=sitedeals15+released and http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sitedeals15+released give Dutch and English results, irrespective of browser and headers sent.

I haven’t been able to see this dependence for Google.nl - are you sure there’s is no hl=en parameter sneaking into your query? That would depend on the Google preferences (cookie) not on the headers sent?
Do you still get English results if you add "hl=nl", so for the http://www.google.nl/search?q=sitedeals15+released&hl=nl query?

But of course, you are right, the language of the content is very important. Which leaves me with this question: is it the language of the page, or the language of the site, or both. If the language of the site itself matters, than non-unilingual sites (like LVB.net, which has Dutch and English pages) would always be handicapped in relation to SEO.

The result on April 1st was basically the same as on my first overview, though I had to cede my first on msn.com to lvb. I removed all of the backlinks on April 2d, but since Google is the slowest of all in updating its results, I’m still first on Google.com (at last with the /sitedeals15-released page, not with this blogpost!), but nowhere near that in the actual contest on the Dutch version.

Not only language does matter, also the country TLD: percept-Bart was first on Google.be on April 1, only second on Google.nl.

So, here are my conclusions on what you need in an SEO contest:

• content in the language of the search query
• some on-page optimization can help, but is not really necessary
• place your content on an already established domain with a high pagerank, preferably the same TLD as the search query
• get backlinks

• with the search keywords in the anchor text
• from high pagerank sites
• from pages in the same language as the search query

• quality is more important than quantity, although quantity doesn’t hurt

Note that real SEO still is far different from a short-term contest on a newly invented (often nonsensical) search query… In real SEO, you’ll have to promote (your client’s) new domains, you ‘ll have to optimise for a wide variety of existing search terms, and the context of the backlinks becomes crucial. Meaning: you need to get backlinks from sites that already score high for search queries in your domain. And the best way to do that still is… with good content :-).