Time Capsule: My First SEO Article Ever

UPDATED: As I was curious to find out if someone else had ever claimed to have written the frist SEO article ever, I noticed that Google picked up this article within an hour of me writing it. This blog was installed, configured and launched officially on March 17, 2008 and has only been 30% SEO optimized (according to my ever expanding WordPress optimization checklist).

In 1995, I wrote an article about Search Engine Optimization and it was picked up by a few local media outlets. I have lost the article itself, but found this review of it recently (dated December 1, 1995). It must be the first SEO article ever and I assure you the info it contained is no longer à-propos. You see, SEO has become a sport and I never played professionally.

I don’t consider myself a SEO-type person. I just make WordPress themes Google-friendly and program sites that are not too complicated so search engines don’t choke on them. I program all my widgets server-side so the resulting pages can be indexed by Google and I have never used black-hat techniques or link farms to accomplish my goals. In the past 10 years, I have benefited from affiliate revenue generated by over 350,000 web pages, all of them about a specific product, most often jewelry or clothing. Then I got bored with Web Gardening and progressively took down all my websites to get back to helping other people succeed on the Web.

Today, my main goal in being #1 for Friendly Webmaster is that people never remember how to spell my first name!

When I published the blog-like <hypermedia> 13 years ago I was just so proud that the title had animation!

Ze article is in French btw, as are most of the projects I worked on between 1994-1997 when I lived in Quebec City.