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In this post I reveal the secret of SEO2!
As of 2026 it’s rather known as “digital PR”.
Yet I rather prefer the term “social SEO” by now.
At the end of the day social media is about SEO too or SEO2!
And the Web is inherently social these days.
Thus this post shows how to promote yourself on social media.
What the heaven is SEO2?
What the heaven is SEO2?
Good question.
No. I don’t mean selenium dioxide!
I sometimes also explain it as:
You can make other people promote you for free! No joke!
Sounds impossible? It’s not a contradiction.
Fasten your seat belts! This will blow your mind!
Conventional self-promotion actually hurts you on social media in contrast.
People get bored when you’re too selfish and just spread the word about yourself.
Why spread the word and not keep it secret?
Why am I revealing the secret?
It’s because the more people know it the better it works.
It also works for me then!
Thus I will show you the way of SEO2 – it’s:
- sustainable
- engaging
- organic
- social
- trustworthy
SEO2 works without the need of aggressive self-promotion on social media and beyond.
It works without manual link building as well.
There are only a few thousands SEO experts out there but millions of webmasters.
Conventional SEO practitioners – more often the average website owners than not – have only very superficial knowledge of SEO.
Thus most people get social media promotion wrong.
They approach it with a selfish SEO 1.0 mindset like it’s 1999.
You have to apply social SEO or SEO2 instead!
Selfish vs selfless engagement online
Selfish people tend to promote themselves on all kinds of social media and beyond.
I prefer not to. Now those of you who know me will shout:
“Wait, you just spammed me this week!”
OK, I admit it! I tweet my posts and share them on LinkedIn.
Other than that, I really want to make the seo2.blog a proof of concept:
You can succeed on the Web – especially as a blogger – without all the ego-driven tactics like:
- self-promotion
- share or link begging
- befriending people just for their social media power
- vote swapping or exchange
What was the ideal vision for SEO2 (both the blog and the concept)?
I mean besides of refraining from the above ways of “promotion”?
Proper social SEO was meant to be based on
- independence from gatekeeper traffic (like Google and Facebook)
- being proud of practicing SEO
- organic reach growth
- flourishing even during my absence
For a while I succeeded at most of these goals.
Why did I go the hard way?
Why not just apply the default mode and push your message using all channels available?
Wasn’t it absurd to shun Google and Facebook in their heydays, the most important traffic sources of the Web? Let me explain!
Practicing SEO means that sooner or later you adapt to each and every annoyance of the Web. Typical Internet annoyances are:
- Making sites Google friendly means often crippling them, especially when you work on a limited budget.
Plus you work with people who don’t know much about user experience (most people don’t). - Being an SEO and using Facebook is like being gay and trying to talk about having kids with heterosexuals.
Either you shut your mouth and everybody accepts you.
Or you have a coming out and have to deal with the consequences like ostracism. - There is either “automation” or real engagement – a kind of DIY everything.
Some people bombard you with automated updates on social media while others listen and respond genuinely.
OK, so what’s the secret? The secret of SEO2 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 anyway I spend hours daily with sharing content created by other people.
I popularize things I like and rarely out of friendship.
The invisible hand of reciprocity
Of course I read the shares of my friends first.
Yet when I don’t like them (the content pieces, not the friends) I don’t share them.
I befriend the people whose content I like. The things I popularize on social media are mostly not even related to SEO etc.
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.
It’s about having
- a unique blog
- a few active social media profiles
- and a small number of friends on several platforms.
Add the secret of SEO2 to it and it is perfectly enough to get almost every single post of yours shared all over the place!
It’s enough even for those which weren’t optimized 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.
You don’t need self-promotion to promote yourself and you not even have to be a popular blogger to make it work.
How? I get promoted while I promote others and it’s not even an exchange or something.
It works due to reciprocity.
People who have benefited from my actions in the past remember that and reciprocate in the future by sharing or linking my content.
Actual real life example of SEO2
The above instructions might still sound a bit abstract.
Thus I’d like you to show an actual example from my own practice.
One of my long-time online friends is Ann Smarty.
We met on a long defunct social site called StumbleUpon back in 2007.
Nowadays she excels as a Reddit expert instead and has a quite successful SEO for AI community there.
Indeed she even convinced me to start using Reddit I boycotted for like 15 years just to join it!
One day I suggested I could help with it as a mod.
I did for a few months. It wasn’t much work and I enjoyed it.
Now she wrote me a recommendation on LinkedIn because we finally worked together on a project after all those years.
So people will read her words and may hire me.
I may even add that as a testimonial to my about page.
Yet I did not plan to get something specific in return.
The natural reciprocity that makes us human took care of that down the road!
* (CC BY-SA 2.0) Creative Commons image by włodi
