Welcome

by RJ Delange
Well hello there, and thank you for visiting. 

Recently I have been intrigued by Search Engine Optimization, and the 'dark art'-like methods and strategies that seemingly go into reaching a number 1 spot in Google.  Pretty soon I found myself familiar with "Penguins" and "Panda's", and - I kid you not - google approved "White Hat" and -viceversa - non-google approved "Black Hat" strategies. If you hear it for the first time, it sounds very "Harry-Potterish", but I guess it makes it easy to separate the good guys from the bad guys.

So far I'm experiencing a steep learning curve, and I decided I wanted a place to keep track of my journey publicly.  This is a strong diversion from what I have always done so far.  It's an experiment:  To see whether knowledge is power, or whether insight is more valuable.  Given the huge free resources found on the internet this should be evident, but it still feels counter-intuitive to me. The last seven years of my career I have spend working in a private equity setting, which made it difficult sharing my knowledge for free.  This all changed because my newest venture is all mine.

As I learn more, I started to realize two things. First: Google is now the largest social laboratory ever created.  But right behind that: Access to this is still surprisingly democratic. In other words, getting access to the largest social laboratory ever created still requires only a computer (or a smart phone), and a connection to the Internet.  What a fantastic era we live in!

So this blog will be the place where I will share what I learn about what works and doesn't work regarding getting relevancy on search engines.  Initially most of it will focus on google, since appearantly they now own 67.5% of all search traffic. And I love their analytics-suite and webmaster tools. More specifically, I love statistics, and how they relate to choices people make.  In the same way you might love sport's statistics.

Anyway - thank you for making it all the way to the end of this article.  You represent just 8.9% of all readers.  What else would you like to see discussed in future articles?
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