The Secret Passageway to the Treasure by Stuck in Customs.
Today I will reveal the secret of SEO 2.0! It shows how to promote yourself without promoting yourself. So fasten your seat belts. Why am I revealing it now? I recently had a discussion on Mixx with Shell Harris of Big Oak SEO about self-submission. The reason was he got almost banned at the SEO 2.0 group due to breaking it’s guideline of strict “no self-submission” repeatedly by accident.
- SEO spam is on the rise
- it works for the people doing it
- self submission is OK (not spam)
I won’t argue with that. I will show you the way of SEO 2.0 -
- sustainable
- reputable
- social
- trustworthy
- organic
SEO 2.0 without the need of self-submission to social media and other more artificial tactics and methods.
While conventional SEO practitioners, more often the average webmasters than not, as there are only a few thousands SEO experts out there but millions of webmasters, have only very superficial knowledge of SEO, they tend to promote themselves on all kinds of social websites and beyond, I usually don’t. Now those of you who know me will shout:
“Wait, you just spammed me this week!”
OK, I admit it, I pushed the Browzmi post as I was really keen on getting publicity for this outstanding social browsing service. Also I tend to push my posts over at the SEOptimise blog I contribute once a week for several reasons. Asides of that, I really wanted to make the SEO 2.0 blog a proof of concept: You can succeed on the Web, especially as a blogger, without all the ego-driven tactics like:
- Self-submission
- Vote begging
- Befriending people just for their social media power
- Vote swapping or exchange
The ideal vision for SEO 2.0 (both the blog and the concept) was, besides of refraining from the above ways of “promotion”, to be based on
- independence from Google traffic
- independence from Digg and Reddit traffic
- being proud of practicing SEO
- organic growth
- flourishing even during my absence
I succeeded at most of these goals. Why did I go the hard way? Isn’t it absurd to shun Google, Digg and Reddit, the most hailed traffic sources of the Web? Let me explain:
Practicing SEO means that sooner or later you normally adapt to each and every annoyance of the Web. Such annoyances are:
- Making sites Google friendly means often crippling them, especially if you work on a limited budget and with people who don’t know much about user experience (most people don’t).
- Being a SEO and using Digg or Reddit is like being gay and not telling anybody. Either you shut your mouth and everybody accepts you or you say “gay” or “SEO” and you feel like you’re in Texas and the lynch mob is waiting.
- There is either the black hat “automation” thing or continuous work, a kind of DIY everything. Getting links for instance should, in theory, work completely naturally, but it usually does not.
OK, so what’s the secret? The secret of SEO 2.0 is a little ZEN-like.
It’s about forgetting your ego and doing everything you want for yourself for others. It works.
As I’m addicted to social media anyways I spend hours daily with stumbling, mixxing and sphinning content of other people. I vote for stuff I like and rarely out of friendship. Of course I read the submissions of my friends first but if I don’t like them (the submissions, not the friends), I don’t vote for them. I befriend the people whose submissions I like though :-) The stuff I push on social media is mostly not even related to SEO etc.
So people on the Web basically know a few things about me, this guy is:
- genuine
- authentic
- very active on the Web
- has multiple interests (open minded)
- not self centered but altruistic
Is this enough? Well, it isn’t. You need to have a blog, a unique voice and you need to do some social networking to be recognizable. I tend to take this for granted by now. Having a unique blog, several active social profiles and having connected with a small number of friends on several platforms plus the secret of SEO 2.0 is perfectly enough to get almost every single post of yours stumbled, mixxed and sphunn, even those which weren’t meant for social media.
Also you get links as these friends tend to link to friends in their blogs. Then the friends of the friends link to you and befriend you etc. etc. etc. The rest is history. I don’t need to promote myself to promote myself and I’m not even an a-list blogger. I get promoted while I promote others and it’s not even an exchange or something.
Related posts:
- 7 Ways Self Submission Hurts Yourself on Social Media
- The Most Important Thing on StumbleUpon: Do Not Pose as, Be a Legit User
- 7 SEO 2.0 Lessons: SEO for Humans Instead of Spiders is Not About Google and “Content is King”
- SEO 2.0 Reality Check: What’s True What Not?
- What Easter Can Teach Us About Web 2.0, Social Media and Blogging
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This thing has 22 Comments
You’ve summed up my philosophy very well – it’s possible to gain links and search rankings with a completely natural strategy but you’ve got to be patient. Really patient.
Exactly, Tad. Reciprocal arrangements are useful in the beginning, but once established, SEO “karma” begins to take root.
PS – I would encourage you to consider adding the subscribe to comments plugin. :)
Andy: How did you know it was you I described? ;-) If you start with a bang, you don’t need patience btw. look at my archive. The first 2 months were very busy on SEO 2.0
Michael: Even in the beginning I didn’t need them. You remember me from back then you know that! I’m very wary of plugins due to WordPress compatibility, update and security concerns…
If I’m reading you right, you’re agreeing with the cloud that Digg and Reddit are overused and the best voting tools are StumbleUpon, Mixx, and Sphinn?
andymurd got it right – patience is the answer. Organic, natural growth is the answer but its unfortunate that many clients are not happy waiting. Hence the explosion in services offering to “get you to the top of Google” yesterday…
Imagine my surprise when a Google alert for my name revealed this post. Who knew our innocent web conversation would elicit a blog post. Just goes to show you have to be careful what you say or type. Luckily, I agree with everything written here and follow the same methodology. If only our clients were as patient for those results…
And for the record, I have my own personal ban of Sphinn due to all the “friendly” sphinning. I love SumbleUpon and have recently started Digging, the right way.
Rock on, OnReact! You are a shining beacon in sea of spam. ;-)
I couldn’t resist. I added this page to my friendfeed and to GoogleReader. Self promotion is in my blood, I guess.
I did a little bit of SEO work around the 2001 – 2002 timeframe. I know that it was a different operation then than now, although some of the basics remain the same. I do wonder thought what you say about not caring about google et al, if you just mean that for your blog or also for your clients as well?
Ari: Yes, a combination of Mixx, Sphinn and StumbleUpon works best for me. Digg and Reddit do not work for SEO topics at all.
steve: In SEO 2.0 you can succeed instantly and you don’t have to wait until Google accepts you. This takes a while.
Shell: Self promotion is not bad per definition but it does not work as well as promotion by others :-)
Itsme: For my conventional SEO clients I do a combination of SEO and SEO 2.0. There I can’t ignore Google of course. My SEO 2.0 blog is testing ground for cutting edge methods of online promotion. Most of these attempt to gain indepencence from the Google monopoly.
“I don’t need to promote myself to promote myself and I’m not even an a-list blogger. I get promoted while I promote others and it’s not even an exchange or something.”
Sounds like promote zen? Good stuff, enjoy your post very much.
good points here. i like this way of thinking. i’ve been trying to practice it as well, but sometimes i wonder if the traffic will eventually arrive. at least now, i feel a bit more encouraged.
In the old days http://onemancan.ca/articles.html you can see I was doing it all the laborious way. I also very much enjoyed what I was doing and the reasons why. I avoided all SEO other than the norm, Meta, Titles, Keywords, and focused more on quality content for a reading audience. Over time, while people around me exploded their incomes manipulating the traffic opportunities via SEO etc., I gained a certain level of credibility. Then my life unraveled, and so did my site. Now I’m working in the industry, and my site is a whole new kettle of fish… so what next? I know not. But this to say, I agree in principle, though the Black Hat tactics are going to continue to be a problem for anyone who really cares more about the purpose of their content, rather than the almighty dollar.
I hope it’s possible to do it with a natural strategy. Who has time to do it any other way? ;-) I tried hiring these things out this year, but it just didn’t pay for itself. Thanks for the article.
Promotion is always the hardest part but it can be handled in a respectful way if you get others to recommend you and your products. That is much more powerful technique.
An excellent article, well I dont know of others but it works for me very well too. I tried everything in the book to get both traffic and rank to my arcade site. Nothing really worked. Then I sat back and thought one day, why would anyone want to come to my site. I wrote a few articles about flash games, talked about the latest games that I had played in a few forums, and things started to turn around – and – I enjoyed it.
very well explained.. writing an article is a matter of interest. this really helped me a lot.
Great article I must say. You have explained some things that I really have never thought about. Thank you
Thanks for the article, the more I read about SEO, the more I realize that I have a lot to learn.
Interesting. You show how to do soft promotion. A must reaing post for every SEO.
Valuable information. I’m still on a very steep learning curve in relation to SEO.
Soft self promotion is definitely the way to go. It can be quite a balancing act to promote without using too much self promoting!
This is a really well written piece. Thanks.
I have been thinking about doing something for a while but as our stuff is mostly information only for those requiring our design, PR, photography and copywriting services we havent bothered.
Your piece has really given me something to consider or act on.
Take good care and get as much joy and fun as you can every day. Cheers.
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