SEO BLOG

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.