SEO 2.0

Many people view social media as a waste of time while others expect them to be some kind of promised land for self promotion. Both groups will never use social media to their fullest potential. The truth lies of course somewhere in between.

While it is easy to waste your time on addictive social media sites like StumbleUpon, Mixx or Sphinn you can use them responsibly and happily to both the benefit of yourself as well as the respective communities.

While I’m not entirely free of addiction and have to fight time wasting tendencies myself, I have, by now and after years of participation, found out several key factors of using social media in the best possible way.

I’m not zaibatsu or Muhammad Saleem but I’m a very active user at the 3 above mentioned communities:

• As onreact-com on StumbleUpon
• As onreact.com on Mixx
• As onreact on Sphinn

Moreover I am actively participating at

• Pownce as Tadeusz S.
• Blogcatalog as onreact

Last but not least I’m an established power user in Germany at

• YiGG (social news) as onreact.com, top user #5 currently (January 08)
• SEOigg as onreact.com as well, top user #2

While I am not trying “to leverage traffic” directly from these communities most of the time I benefit from these is several ways:

• Industry acceptance as a social media expert
• Direct contact to clients, some approach me, others look me up
• Entertainment, I feel better afterwards when I take a break to stumble or mixx
• Information, I’m the first one to know what’s going on in my fields of interest
• I’m famous, this is no joke, people from all over the world know me

To make sense social media need to work both ways.

If you spend hours daily as a user generating content for free you are basically working like a slave.

So there must be a mutual benefit so that you do not get exploited. If only 2 or less of the above points apply to you and none other positive outcomes come to your mind you should rethink the way you use as the social media companies use and abuse you as a free workforce.

The best way to make social media work for the mutual benefit of you and not only the venture capitalists behind them is setting up a blog. Remember that social media otherwise own all of you:

• your social relations
• your contents
• your time

Having a blog means remaining your own master.

As a blogger you can use social media to drive traffic to your blog or not, but at least nobody can take away your contents, make you pay for contacting your friends, or reselling your and making money off your work while you earn nothing for it.

Your blog is your focal point of your social media journeys.

So implying that you already have a blog you should try to stick to the following 10 habits of highly efficient social media power users:

1. Use social media in the morning, during breaks or at the evening. When you’re not able to work yet or already social media will allow you to spend the time somewhat productively and actively anyways. Of course do not spend all your free time doing that.
2. Do not read daily newspapers or direct news sources, let the social media users filter the important stuff for you, this way you spare time in fact. Check only websites you really can’t live without directly.
3. Use a RSS Reader like Netvibes and only read the headlines relevant in a given moment. For instance on Netvibes I have a tab for SEO blogs and another for green blogs. I only read the green blogs when I’m done with my work.
4. Socialize with your friends on several platforms. This way no company can take away your social capital or sell it back to you once they leave beta, their share plummets or the company is swallowed by another less scrupulous one.
5. Never actively search for content you could submit to social media, submit stuff that you read and like anyways.
6. Submit stuff that is popular on one platform to another if you think it might be suitable for this audience as well.
7. Concentrate on only a few of your favorite social media sites. Use not the most popular ones but those which have the most benefit to you personally either by suiting your interests best or having a positive impact on your online presence not necessarily via traffic only. For instance Sphinn is less important for direct traffic but very good for my reputation. Also Mixx is not for traffic but I established my own SEO 2.0 sub-community (group) there with my peers.
8. If you want to get traffic via social media use them like Domino: For instance I just need to submit a story to Sphinn in oder to get stumbled and then mixxed and back again.
9. Do not submit your own stories at social media communities unless they really condone it and you are a well known and/or respected community member there.
10. Do submit stuff of your favorite bloggers and peers. Link them in your blog posts and befriend them where it does make sense. For instance befriending people on SU does only make sense if you want their reviews served on your SU page and it might cost you the traffic if after a while only your friends stumble you. Sphinn has only a rudimentary friends feature. While at Mixx, at Pownce and at BlogCatalog befriending people has only a few drawbacks it has major benefits and is really one of the main pillars of each of the sites.

So if you develop these 10 habits you will get quite popular on social media just after using them for a while.

Participation is key and if you do not expect instant gratification via loads of traffic you will succeed in the middle or long term also as a blogger. Eventually you will get loads of traffic anyways.

Social media participation is not a one night stand, it’s a stable relationship.

Once you understand that, you’re on your way to become a power user.

You don’t have to be a top user to be a power user. It’s not about numbers. It’s about how you participate not solely how much.

While I promised you a redefinition of SEO when I started this blog, in fact it’s still my motto in the header, until now I delivered only an upgrade, a new version of SEO. Yes, SEO 2.0 until now does not entirely redefine SEO.

I gave you only some hints what SEO 2.0 is all about. Thus many people more or less assume that SEO 2.0 is more a new set methods or rather it is the place where the optimization takes place has changed. So most of you assume that Social Media Optimization, Reputation Management and targeting Universal Search are key aspects of SEO in a Web 2.0 environment. This environment is not new anymore, it’s taken for granted. So this way, SEO 2.0 is late in a way. It appears years after the appearance of Web 2.0.

While all the assumptions above are not wrong, they are just part of the story. In fact SEO 2.0 as I perceive it, because I did not invent or introduce it, it’s just that I watch how the web evolves, SEO 2.0 is more than that.

So what else?

While SEO as an acronym still stands for Search Engine Optimization let us take a look at the current stage or definition of search on the Web.

Search in the sense of search engines, robot driven data bases of information, works in a way many people can’t cope with. You basically have to know already what you are looking for in order to find it. It works like a dictionary. You need a term you want to look up, without knowing the correct term you are lost.

 

What happens with people who don’t know how to express their needs yet? How do you know you need SEO for instance if you are not familiar with the term? You will probably attempt to circumscribe what your are seeking. Something like „How to appear on top of Google?“ would be a logical question to pose in a case like this.

Now what happens at Google is that it can’t answer questions. It just echoes your question and if you’re lucky it will find an instance of the same or similar questions others published on the web.

Now what do you do if you don’t even imagine that something like SEO can exist? Most people do not even know that you can influence search results, especially without manipulating them. People still tend to stare at me when I try to explain it to them or assume that I am a spammer.

No let’s consider StumbleUpon. You probably do not think that SU is a search engine do you?

Well, let’s look at what SU does: It suggests you websites that might be of interest to you based on your preferences and what your peers like. They call it a discovery tool, some people might reflect on it as some kind of Internet TV (channel surfing) while the official term is by now social browsing.

Now let’s take a second look:

StumbleUpon is an engine. It’s a program using algorithms that attempt to sort and rate the relevance of websites. The only difference to Google is the kind of input the engine gets. While at Google the input comes from spiders crawling the web which is then ranked based on a plethora of human induced factors like links, at SU you have humans submitting and rating websites and their contents.

 

Of course SU also ranks your submission based on how many people thumb it up and review, how fast as well. Moreover what people do like it or you is crucial. The more respected you are at SU the more influence you have. Similarly with Google where the search engine assumes that the older your website is and the more links it has among others the better it must be.

The main difference is that you do not have to know at StumbleUpon what you are seeking. A vague idea is enough to open up a whole sesame of precious jewels of the web. If you enter the category „Internet“ you might find a site about SEO even if you didn’t know it existed. So StumbleUpon might not be called a search engine but still technically explained it is one.

Of course this is no revolutionary insight I present here. So this is still not the redefinition of SEO I want to present to you. This is just an introduction. This is a post that will lead you towards the right direction: Towards a new definition of SEO.

What is most important is that you keep in mind that

SEO is about helping people to find the stuff they seek online while assisting others to be found.

 

While it does not make sense to come up with new acronyms that confuse people each time a new trend in SEO arises we can make use of this term and make it reflect the changes that happen around us on the current Web.

Stay with me and accompany me on the way to a new SEO.

The currently best social news site out there, Mixx, has a feature I haven’t seen implemented that effectively anywhere else: Groups. In fact I often feel reminded of Ning and it’s way of creating miniature social networks. Mixx groups make the social news site able to compete with all the niche social news sites like Sphinn. Here you get both: Your one size fits all, as well as your personalized news plus the specialized news and posts for and from your peers.

While Mixx is already great to reach the early adopters and social media mavens you now can target like minded people from your industry or just people with the same interests. This has several advantages:

• You get noticed by the people who are prone to like your submissions
• Your submissions will be noticeable for days or sometimes weeks
• You are not dependent on the front page or “get popular” metaphor that all of us got so used to on other social news sites which was obsolete when it was introduced already (Web is not print)
• People just can’t make you feel bad about your submissions as often happens for SEO bloggers who are accused of Spam based on theassumption that all of SEO is spam per se, here you can target only the group if you want
• The group makes people feel a bond. They act together although still independently. Until now social media was called social although it was more of an alienated place where everybody competed against each other to get on the front page.

Just a few days ago (as of 28 of January, 2008) Mixx made a change of the submission interface which integrates groups even better than before. I’m already in several groups and I introduced 2 new ones, SEO 2.0 and iGoogle, so I want you to learn how to use them:

1. To submit to a group you have to join it, otherwise it’s read only unless it’s private. There are three kinds of groups, private, 50/50 and public groups. Private ones will invite you whereas 50/50 groups will allow you to apply for membership. Public groups allow everybody to join themselves. For SEO 2.0 you need to apply, iGoogle is free for all.
2. Now you can add postings to a group or several groups you belong to.
3. Voting for a post in a group counts for each group separately. So if you vote something up at SEO 2.0 it will only gain a vote there, not in the iGoogle group or the Writing for Writers group even if it was submitted to these two also. Moreover and most importantly, if you vote for a group post inside a group, the vote does not count for the overall site. So you might end up with 5 votes in the group and 1 on the general Mixx page.

Now what is the SEO 2.0 group good for? Of course to game Mixx No, as you might already suspect if you know me I want to establish an accepted authority group within Mixx. As it’s often very difficult to even admit on social media that you are doing SEO as most people tend to mistake SEO for spam without further investigation, the SEO 2.0 group stands for quality submissions of mostly visionary character and no self promotion. There is only one submission guideline: Do not submit yourself. I want to cite the original explanation:

- Please do not submit your own stuff. Ask someone else to do that. This way you can ensure that the post is worth it.

Of course as SEO 2.0 is not just SEO there is a wide variety of topics this group covers:

SEO 2.0 is about blogging, Web 2.0, social media, web design and development, search, SEO. We strive to understand these in order to reach the best possible exposure and reputation online.

We strive to become of well respected voice inside the Mixx community. Thus I do not admit everybody to the group. I want to see that a prospective member is not only promoting her or himself, covers not only traditional SEO and has at least some promising achievements on social media. This not free advertising for all. So that said I welcome and encourage you to join us at SEO 2.0! All bloggers and social media users are welcome, not just SEO experts.

Remember though that you do not join Mixx or the SEO 2.0 group to gain huge instant direct traffic. This medium will allow you to reach like minded people like

• seomarty of SEO Smarty
• tamar of techipedia among plenty of others
• pleeker of Small Business SEM
• SeoDesignSolutions of, guess it, SEO Design Solutions
• GoogleTutor of, this is also difficult, Google Tutor
• Frozen2Late of Look Sharp, SEO Chicks and so on
• JordanKasteler of the Utah SEO Pro blog

and also reach out to a greater community of social media power users. Also, I will stumble, sphinn and link you in cases where I like your submissions so it’s also good for indirect exposure.

From now on I want to start a little series of posts. It will be called SEO 2.0 basics. I will write short posts about fundamentals needed in SEO 2.0. I want to start with StumbleUpon categories.

As you probably know SU is a great source of targeted traffic if you know how to use and not abuse it.

A key factor in making stumblers visit your site, stay there, and thumb you up is the category you post a submission in.

StumbleUpon has an overwhelmingly large number of categories. I use SU frequently for several months now and still haven’t used most of them. I do not stumble SEO stuff only so I tried plenty.

In this short post I want to advise SEOs and search or social media marketers on which categories they can submit their posts to and why.

The 7 best fitting cats are:

1. Marketing
2. Business
3. Writing
4. Weblogs (Blogs)
5. Search
6. Web development
7. Internet

Now this might seem obvious but there are certain aspects of these you should take into account.

SU works like a TV set. If you serve SEO on the discovery channel or at CNN people will frown upon you.

If you use “Marketing” you will get significantly less traffic while you seldom will be bashed and thumbed down because you will reach the same audience you meet at Sphinn. So if the post is SEO speak strictly put it in here. Remember that thumbs down mean no traffic if you get too many of them.

A post like “Why Google is So Important for Small Business” could fit in “Business”, but try to write for a wider audience. Still: Not the biggest traffic here.

“Writing”: Copyblogger posts please insert here. Remember, also people interested in writing books read it.

4 is self-evident isn’t it? Do not overuse it though: Just because you write about SEO in a blog does not mean it fits in “Weblogs”. Good for meta-blogging though.

You can use “Search” if you write about SEO from a less webmaster or marketer oriented perspective I think. Here the audience is a little larger than in “Writing” and “Marketing”, but there are less stumblers than in “Weblogs”.

A post about ten ways to tweak your website to make it more suitable for spiders fits in “Web development”. You can get quite a big audience here.

Now 7, “Internet” is the king of the categories that SEO or rather SMO fits in.

Now beware though, people will hate you if you get too popular here. You may get thousands of visitors but also get so many thumbs down that you won’t go anywhere but SEO hate hell’s kitchen. Ask yourself before posting: Is my post really relevant for the Internet as a whole? If not make it relevant for it or use a more specific category, especially if you are new at StumbleUpon.

Happy stumbling!

Click to enlarge! Oh, it doesn’t work?

This is not a funny post. Some days ago a client of mine wrote me an angry email threatening to end our cooperation. Not any client, a client who is with me for years now. It came out of nowhere, so I was like, wow! what the heck!?!

You know, although I am preaching SEO 2.0 here, most of the time I work as SEO 1.0 for clients, doing keyword research, SEO copywriting or link building mostly for the German market.

As I read the email I wondered whether I am in a parallel universe as he claimed that our traffic was down for the last 6 months, whereas Google Analytics clearly showed that it grew continuously over the past half year.

When I read on, I realized what the problem is. Half a year ago the client’s PageRank was at 5, then it fell to 4 some months ago and finally in January it got a 3 in the PageRank lottery.

Remember that the traffic, and the rankings, mostly at #1, 2 and 3 for the most important terms, went up or remained stable all of the time. Only neglected keywords or where Google tweaked something performed less good, but still with no traffic problems at large. Even in December when most people do not need what the client is selling (it’s used for work thus not neede on holidays) the traffic was only 10% down.

In fact, just yesterday the site hit a six months high! A traffic record, mostly due to organic search rankings and thus my work.

Then I checked the bounce rate, meaning how many people are leaving immediately upon seeing yuor page (between 20 and 30% here), pages per visit (around 5), I checked the keywords, most of them really really targeted, many long tails keys with an exact match for what the client offers.

So what the hell is the problem here? It’s PageRank! For many clients you must enlarge your PageRank! This is the only part of SEO they can actually see. They will ignore your thorough reports with analysis of rankings, traffic etc. They will look at the PageRank bar and be either happy or angry. So you basically do not need to optimize the pages. Just start PageRank optimization and people will be satisfied!

On a more professional level: What could this client do? He pays for the lowest possible SEO maintenance plan. A plan that basically only allows you to stay where you are after initial optimization and gaining some rankings. Nonetheless the rankings improved. With only a few hours for stats checking and link building a month you really can’t take a look at more refined metrics though.

Last time he complained about poor sales I proposed to him that he should check his “shopping cart abandoncy rate”, meaning how many people try to buy something and fail during the process. Also what I suspect, the market he sells to is saturated, so you have to extend your scope to other similar niches.

The less the people pay though, the more they will assume that you, the SEO is responsible for their failure.

Some clients expect you to perform magic tricks for a few bucks.

While in this case the numbers are exactly the opposite of what he claims and only PageRank fell there are at least 7 metrics you should make the client aware of instead of PageRank:

1. rankings, are you at the top or not, if yes you should check
2. traffic, to determine how many people find you
3. bounce rate, to determine if the right people find the right product or service on your site
4. conversion rate, how many visitors reach the goal you want them to, here to buy something?
5. shopping cart abandoncy rate, how many people fail to end a transaction?
6. sales, this is obvious
7. ROI, for instance this client spends the same amount of money for Google Ads while getting 5 to 10 times more visitors via organic search results, so the Return On Investment is at least a few times as high with SEO than with PPC here, as I can’t ascribe all visitors to my SEO efforts but most. Sadly I don’t how many actually bought something to make this a real monetary metric.

For some clients sadly just one metric counts: PageRank. So enlarge your PageRank and make people happy. Quit SEO and start PageRank optimization. It’s less work and it offers instant gratification!

Social inclusion to feel more confident, image by carf

While there are some social media authority blogs already out there for some time, I noticed that recently there seems to be a kind of explosion:

Social media blogs appear everywhere while existing blogs change their main focus.

Dosh Dosh for instance who does not focus on making money online anymore but on Internet marketing and social media.

So I want to share 11 new social media blogs that are really a must read in no particular order:

• Social Desire - Do I really have to introduce Shana here? Just read this.
• Social Media Mom - Truly nurturing her audience, the social media mom.
• Dawud Miracle - This guy miraculously found a way into my already crowded mind
• Social Networking Articles Blog - Do you love huge lists and how-tos? Now here you get some. More links a man can take.
• Social Media Trader - This blogs stands out because of the sheer quality content it offers
• Social Media with Bud Caddell - Bud is not that new but already has a portfolio of articles you probably want to read
• Social Networking Blog - SociableBlog.com - This sociable blog brings you the latest news about services early adopters of social media will surely cherish
• Social News Watch - SNW also looks behind the scenes and uncovers aspects others ignore
• Collective Thoughts - Social Media Thinking - This is my collective of social media blogging giants, I’m the only dwarf there. They are all gargantuan.
• social media and green horses » chmod755 - If you like red cows you will love to visualize red horses. Moreover this guy lives next door so if he does offend you I can punch him in real life
• SEO Consulting Blog - SEO Smarty - She calls herself SEO to scare off the faint of heart but she writes about social media as if she was born at MySpace

I have to admit I rather read these social media blogs than the old authority ones: I don’t want to say that they are stale it’s just that I always preferred the vanguard.

Which new social media blogs do you read?

While many people still assume that SEO 2.0 is just a mislead term for SMO/M (social media optimization/marketing) it’s plainly put not true. In SEO 2.0 you still in many cases aim at search results in the broadest sense. One of the reasons is the so called Universal Search. This term basically signifies that Google and other search engines will mix static search results with all kinds of other media and stuff, like images, video, news, maps to name just the most common.

You can use these additional ways to be on top of Google search results, at least temporary or for some users, but in many cases also permanently. To show you the power of Universal Search and thus SEO 2.0, the one and only valuable strategy of Web 2.0 SEO I present to you 7 ways to use Google Universal Search to appear at the top of the so called SERPS of Google.

Google Local/Maps
This one is one of the most common ways to appear above your competition on Google results. To appear here you need appearances in local directories and reviews on sites like Booking.com or Tripadvisor instead of links. Obviously it’s great for hotels and local businesses. The more reviews you get the higher you end up.

Google Video
If you look for a ventriloquist for instance you will find 4 videos in the top 20, 2 at YouTube and 2 at Metacafe. So obviously you should upload a video there to rank high. It might be not that simple for this keyword as there are many videos, but it’s worth a try. I bet there are lots of keywords where there are fewer videos. Good for anybody who can sell something that will blend on video, basically everybody.

Google Image Search
If you look for pop stars or artists you will in most cases see images above all the other results. Try Britney Spears or one of the most notorious artists, Banksy. While optimization for image search would take up a post of it’s own it is still by far simpler than link building etc. for a conventional #1 spot.

Google News
While you might think that you are not New York Times and you’ll never get there, it’s one of the easier endeavours. Either you submit your press release to a free press release site that gets featured on Google News or you might even set up a multi author blog and apply for inclusion in Google News yourself. You can guest post at one if you need a quick success story. Look at the examples above: Britney and Banksy SERPS both often include news.

Google Product Search (formerly Froogle)
This one is also obvious and fairly simple, just submit your products to shopping search engines like Bizrate and/or Ebay. Good for shop owners obviously.

Google BlogSearch
This one is evident but it’s not rolled out yet it seems. At least i can’t see it yet. Google nonetheless announced to add BlogSearch results soon to Google search results. So get a blog now.

Subscribed Links
This is a great way to combine RSS and search. When I look for SEO in Google, at #4 I see Search Engine Roundtable. Why? I subscribed to their feed in my search results, like thousands of others. So when I search for SEO I will get the articles matching. Of course, here you need a blog too.

StumbleUpon
Well, this is not really about Universal Search but it’s very similar. Millions of StumbleUpon users see enhanced Google results. They can see which pages were stumbled already, how often, by whom etc. So you appear much more trustworthy having 5 stars added by the StumbleUpon toolbar than your competition which has none.

There are other types of Google special searches like Google Books, Scholar, Groups which are not that pervasive yet but for some topics and areas of expertise already common. So please forget about SEO as a set of fixed practices like SEO copywriting, link building etc. SEO 2.0 is as multifaceted as the real world is.

Moreover consider that Google personalizes search results based on search history and Google bookmarks. Also iGoogle contributes to that. So you might end up in the top 10 for SEO for some people while others won’t see you at all.

Many marketers just don’t get it. Either they are plain ignorant, silly or worse. Usually I’m not bashing anybody but this time a post called “Silly Marketer… Mixx Is For Kids” [sic!] makes me think that we are still in 2003. As if social media were something completely new and nobody knew how to deal with them.

Now that link baits exist since 2004 and prevail or rather are already outdated in some cases as many people by now sense the too obvious ones here comes a guy to complain about traffic from Mixx. First off we know that traffic is not the only measurement to look at in SEO. Aside that it’s direct traffic we talk about. So if you get 200 visitors directly via Mixx the number is very similar to Sphinn for instance.

Is Sphinn for kids too?

I’ve been on the front page of both “more than once” so the numbers are not just accidentally more or less the same.

The main problem is not only the focus on the visitors but it’s SEO on social media itself.

In conventional SEO selfishness rules: It’s Selfish Ego Onanism in many cases like saying “Hey, I’m on Digg and got 50.000 visitors”. I’m guilty of that myself sometimes even as a SEO 2.0 but what’s the difference between obsolete SEO and SEO of the 2nd generation? It’s the mindset and thus the approach to the community.

In SEO you are plainly selfish, “you against the rest of the world”, in SEO 2.0 you are social, “you with others to reach common goals”.

So a SEO of the 1.0 kind won’t contribute anything much of value to a community. He will only reap fruits he hasn’t sown on social media. Basically conventional SEO is still largely parasitical. Black hat SEOs are the locusts eating up everything and destroying the plantation. White hat SEOs just take a small part of the crop, but they still come and take away something that’s not theirs.

In SEO 2.0 the mindset changed. We plant the seeds we harvest.

Many conventional SEOs practicing SMO will in most cases come as outsiders and not integrate well with a community.

The transition to SEO 2.0 is everywhere though. On the most basic level it’s providing value to the communities you participate in. Participation is the key term here. SEOs of the 2.0 kind do not only respect the communities and contribute, they build them up.

Now while you take StumbleUpon for instance you’ll see many SEO stumblers contributing really a lot. Still most power users are non-marketers. With Sphinn and Mixx this changed even more: Marketers themselves are either the majority or a big part of power users creating value and building the community from the start. This is no wonder with Sphinn but Mixx is a general interests news community. Still here you will notice that many marketers and well known SEOs among them are power users here.

Also the makers of Mixx actively embraced SMO and SEO specialists, being interviewed at Collective Thoughts for instance.

It’s not the first community I build up with, I did in Germany before so I know how it works.

Once you’re an accepted power user you are part of the community and you’re immune against the “SEO is spam” attacks by notorious SEO haters who in most cases do not contribute anything of value either.

I know that many of the SEO people reading this will think something like “so much work for nothing” and “I don’t buy this SEO 2.0 crap” but you feel it already that you’re wrong.

Still I will address you on your terms. I mentioned “direct traffic” and Sphinn. I did it to make you understand how Mixx already works for me. It’s similar to Sphinn. Right now we have mostly early adopters on Mixx, among them you get a high percentage of SEO ans SMO specialists. Yes, many of my social media friends are there. The same people are on Mixx, Sphinn, StumbleUpon and other platforms. So guess what happens?

Yes, the same people vote for me on different platforms, wherever they encounter my submissions, or they submit my stuff.

That’s in a nutshell the way of SEO 2.0

I just need to submit something to Sphin or mixx to get stumbled for instance. Or to get links. Basically it goes even a step further: I sumbmit someone elses post to Mixx, then s/he will post my stuff on Sphinn and thus I get stumbled, but that’s advanced SEO 2.0

In 6 months or a year from now when Mixx will yield 2.000 or 20.000 instead of 200 visitors I’ll be there and I will vote you down if you come to reap my fruits and misuse my community. People at Mixx will trust my judgement on SEO as I will be the SEO guy who was there from almost day one who is a fundamental part of the community, while you will just an outsider trying “to leverage traffic”.

On a side note: I enjoy Mixx very much, it’s the best community until know I participated in. So it’s not work at all. With the wrong mindset you won’t grasp it though.

Do you know Matt Cutts? This famous cat blogger with the ugly WordPress theme?

Yes, I know he is only famous because he works at Google and he can shatter lives of people who depend on online revenue with one click. While most SEO 1.0 aficionados dread this guy and pray each day not to get penalized (why does this word sound so similar to “penis”? Is it because people do not want to get f****d by Google?) I do not read his blog for at least 10 reasons.

So the people unfamiliar with SEO 2.0 still assume that Matt Cutts is an authority on SEO while he only tells you stuff everybody already knows or at least should, like content is king, hidden text is bad, Google wants you to use link condoms or you get f****d.

Thus he ranked #1 for SEO blog for a long time (now third). As Google is too stupid to notice that SEO 2.0 is a blog I do not rank well for SEO blog. Besides I aim at the more important and broad term SEO.

While it took me only 2 months to enter the Google.com top 100 for the term SEO for the first time, now I accidentally discovered that I just outranked Matt Cutts for it.

Yes I outrank Matt Cutts for the term “SEO” in Google.com at least as viewed from Europe.

As it wasn’t very difficult to achieve that I will tell you how I did it. Not that it took me real work or I aimed at outranking Matt Cutts, I get most of my traffic via non-Google sources anyways. Still I want to show you the insurmountable dominance of SEO 2.0

Also you too can outrank Matt Cutts for the term SEO. It’s easy.

Follow these steps:

1. Set up a blog
2. Pick a short name for it that starts with SEO, keep the 2nd term short, not more than 5 characters, something like SEO bitch (if you love Gangsta Rap), SEO Meteo (if you’re french), SEO Spam (to gain support from Internet newbies and Digg users).
3. Set up a subdomain on your old “authority” domain
4. Blog something like 3 times a week
5. Use Sphinn and StumbleUpon to gain authority
6. Socialize with other (SEO) bloggers
7. Do not give a damn about Google traffic, link building (let the links come to you), meta tags etc.

And there you are outranking Matt Cutts for SEO.

OK, now you might argue that I still rank at #88 while Matt Cutts ranks at #89 but I told you, rankings do not matter that much in SEO 2.0 - most blogs get direct traffic or social media traffic so you don’t need Google. Only SEO spammers need Google

Do you remember how I defeated Lyndon of Cornwall SEO last time? Now he attempts a comeback on the link baiting scene. No chance man, White Sugar, formerly known as Mad Tad the SEO Destroyer is still the monarch!

So let’s take a look at his renewed attempt, submitting an old post to StumbleUpon. He proposes 13 link baiting headlines about chocolate to choose from. While some of them are not bad for beginners of SEO 2.0 they are by far not sufficient for SEO 2.0 superheroes. Mad Tad the SEO destroyer will teach you Lyndon! No wall of corn may protect you when White Sugar strikes!

At first I will optimize his proposed 13 headlines, then I will come up with another 13 which will be at least 5 times as good as his original ideas.

Lyndon’s headlines first, the optimized version following:

• 28 Reasons why chocolate is the new super food | 33 Reasons Why Chocolate is the New Milk
• Ten tips to using chocolate in your diet | 10 Chocolate Cheats to Outsmart Your Body
• Ways to impress your guests with after dinner chocolate | Don’t Shoot Me! I Just Made Your Wife Happy With Chocolate
• Fellas, did you know that woman are more open to suggestion after eating chocolate | In Bed with Madonna, Guy: I Served Chocolate
• How chocolate can send you to heaven and back | Sweet Enlightenment? New Chocolate Meditation
• How to lose weight without reducing your chocolate habit | Loose Fat, Eat More Chocolate!
• Amazing benefits of chocolate revealed | Olympic Athletes Eat More Chocolate Than You!
• Pound for pound chocolate is healthier than a carrot | 0 Calories Chocolate Invented
• Chocolate! Why it’s a potent drug. And still legal! | Man Arrested for Sniffing White Chocolate
• Gain crucial antioxidants, simply by eating chocolate | Gain Strengths Now: Eat Chocolate
• How eating chocolate can increase your muscle mass | Chocolate Better Than Steroids
• What chocoholics know about the secret of sexual temptation | I Killed for Chocolate Chocoholic Admits
• Why some women eat tons of chocolate and yet stay thin | True Stories: This Women Loose weight By Eating Chocolate

Now check out these 13 exclusive killer headlines by Mad Tad the SEO destroyer!

1. Jane 22: Chocolate Saved my Life!
2. Paris: The Chocolate Killer Takes Another Victim
3. New Study: Men Love Women Eating Chocolate
4. The Chocolate War: Numerous Civilians Affected
5. Iran to Ban Chocolate in Drug Law
6. Stop Me Before I Do It: Chocolate Lowers Suicide Rate
7. Reach Eternal Bliss with Chocolate
8. Scientists: Chocolate Can End World Hunger
9. Tesco: 6 Injured in Last Chocolate Bar Fight
10. Fidel Castro on Death Bed: Chocolate Better Than Communism
11. Chocolate Gate: “Voters Bribed with Chocolate” FBI Spokesman Says
12. Tragic Death: Suspect Shot After Reaching for Chocolate Bar
13. Use Chocolate to Get Rich and Famous, I Did

If you take a second look at my headlines and my optimization of Lyndon’s headlines, I just did, you will notice at least 7 key guidelines to write killer headlines:

• Touch topics people really care about: Love, death, beauty, health, sex, crime, humanity, money…
• Be bold, very bold, promise the ultimate, exagerate as much as you can in a headline without sounding ridiculous
• Do not be afraid to touch negative issues, while still being overall positive
• Instead of limiting your scope be off topic and connect it to yours
• Write like a poet working for a tabloid, use graphic language metaphors, oxymorons, hyperboles
• Include personal aspects, Don’t write “objectively”, be very emotional
• Doing something illegal sound adventurous, pose as a law breaker

Do aim as high as you can. Do not limit yourself while brainstorming, thinking about how a headline could offend somebody or similar issues. You still can delete it afterwards.

So what Lyndon? Strike back if you can! Come on, don’t be a wimp!

If you read this and think this guy is plain crazy, I want him to marry my daughter, you don’t need that hassle. From now on I will offer “killer headline services” for link baiting. 50$ per headline. It’s sounds cheap, but I only need some minutes to come up with several. You get 5 suggestions for this price.