Do Web 2.0 Bloggers Use Web 1.0 SEO Tactics?

What do the A-list bloggers and Web 2.0 advocators have to do with “outdated” web 1.0 SEO techniques like ?

The answer is everything.

Do you think top “make money online” blogs like Shoe Money, John Chow, and Dosh Dosh would do something as “silly” as submitting their blogs to web directories? No?

The picture here shows otherwise. While submitting to web directories, I have come across all of the above mentioned blogs, and more, in various paid web directories. They hardly talk about directory submissions on their blogs, but they do it nevertheless.

“But..” you say, “…how did this happen?”

There are only 3 possible explanations for this:

1. They did it themselves, submitting to a handful of high-ranking paid directories for valuable one-way links
2. Their fans submitted for them, of out love for their content and value they bring to the market
3. They outsource their SEO to an individual or company and pay them for their services

Considering these are paid directories, and that the actual act of submitting your blog to some of these isn’t easy, I would rule out possibility number 2. No matter how good your content is, I don’t think your readers are going to pay $20 – $99 to list your blog on a paid directory, when they could just list theirs!

I think it’s more likely that the A-list bloggers outsource SEO and linking to a third party, while they focus on building readership and content. Or, they can go to a handful of paid directories and submit it themselves. This is usually done when their blogs are fairly new, just to get some “SEO juice” flowing.

So why would they want to do something like this when there are super-cool and revolutionary web 2.0 stuff like social bookmarking, and that’s supposed to be the “right” way to get one way links to your blogs?

The answer is: Because it works!

One common mistake most people make is to listen to the SEO tip du jour. They blindly follow what the A-list bloggers say about marketing, SEO, , Google, and a whole lot of other things. But they never really do the research to discover the truth for themselves.

They continue to be led, influenced, and manipulated.

In my post about submitting your blog to 600 web directories, some negative commenters say “It’s a waste of time” or “It doesn’t work” or “Google will catch you and put your sorry ass in SEO prison if you do that”. How many of them speak from experience, and how many are simply regurgitating what they read somewhere else?

Here’s the truth about blog SEO according to Gobala Krishnan:

1. Don’t bother with web 2.0 marketing and SEO techniques until you’ve done all the basic web 1.0 marketing and SEO stuff, including and article marketing.
2. No traffic is as good as targeted, free search engine traffic obtained by getting high rankings in search engines like Google and Yahoo. Pay-Per-Click or PPC ads come second, but these can be costly in the long run.
3. , but it works better when someone finds your content in search engines and then uses the social networks to share your site or pages. This is why the big blogs get more coverage from social media than your site does!
4. The basic idea is to improve your rankings by getting more links, with your keywords as the anchor text if possible. Does it really matter if it’s web 2.0 or not, as long as you’re getting results?

I strongly encourage you to not take my words as the absolute truth either. I think you should do your own research, and what you discover along the way will guide you to the truth.

(Challenge: Go to any of the top directories found on directory rating websites. Type in the URL or name of an authority blog you visit often, and I bet you’ll find it listed in at least one)

Tagged as: directories, search engine optimization, SEO