When I started this blog I proclaimed that SEO is dead and that you don’t need it anymore to succeed on the Web.
Moreover I announced a new kind of SEO — SEO 2.0!
SEO 2.0 works almost completely differently than what you know as SEO.
15 months I ranked in the top 10 for the query [seo blog] at Google.com!
And I haven’t done 90% of the things that traditional SEO or SEO 1.0 consists of.
How did I rank on top? By dismissing conventional SEO folly
Obsolete SEO methods I haven’t used:
I have
- not submitted this blog to any directories, not even blog directories
- not exchanged links, neither reciprocal nor “3 way links” or anything like that
- not optimized my meta tags, in fact I don’t have any, not even a description
- not made any effort for traditional link building
This was truly revolutionary given the SEO techniques used at that time!
Conventional SEOs still preached some of these or came up with new useless ones like
- “PageRank sculpting”
- commenting on dofollow blogs
- setting up multiple profiles on social media for the link value
While I do not support this flawed advice I did some of it inadvertently by using the Web as it was intended:
- I never did use nofollow on this blog for PageRank reasons. I just nofollowed a few sources that were just wrong.
- I commented on all kinds of blogs but not for SEO reasons. Some dofollow blogs were among them I bet.
- As an early adopter I tried dozens of new services but I have never done that just for “getting a free link”.
What did I do instead to push my rankings?
- I linked out plenty to other SEO bloggers and beyond
- I socialized on a few platforms (StumbleUpon, Twitter, Delicious most notably)
- I contributed on social media for reputation not traffic
Moreover I broke a few rules of business, blogging and SEO in my writing:
- I used outrageous humor
- I wrote about politics and my opinions
- I spoke out against the obnoxious Digg and Reddit cesspools
What else did I do? Any conventional SEO?
The only conventional SEO techniques that helped IMHO
The only SEO 1.0 techniques I really used and still work are was changing the title and headline by adding “SEO blog”. Why?
Otherwise Google was too stupid to recognize my WordPress blog as a weblog.
Yes, I was ranking on top for SEO 2.0 from the start.
Yet it was only when people saw my h1 headline “SEO blog” and started referring to my publication as a “SEO blog” that I ranked for it as well.
Then Google finally managed to notice the fact that I’m indeed running a SEO blog.
On November 21st, 2008 I was the top 10 for [seo blog] from both the US and Germany (where I operate from) for two days in a row.
The rankings fluctuated so I might have shown up in the Top 20 again.
Also you might argue that the keyphrase [seo blog] does not yield much traffic and most people do not optimize for it.
Yet as stated above I didn’t do much SEO either ;-). Nonetheless it’s a proof of concept.
I left out many SEO 1.0 best practices on purpose to prove that in a Web 2.0 environment you don’t need them anymore.
15 months later I was in the top ten just behind Matt Cutts. At that time he was the only official Google spokesperson.
His private SEO blog (that also covered cats) was the go to resource for inside scoop!
Plus I was also outranking all kinds of renowned industry experts from all over the planet.
