After a lot of hard work, I’m happy to announce that MySEOCommunity is live. Since this is our first post, I want to explain how the site got started, as well as what we want to accomplish with it.

Background

My name is Gerald Weber, and this site is the result of my many years as a professional SEO and social media enthusiast. I first entered the SEO/SEM field in March 2001. After several years of working for other people, I started Search Engine Marketing Group in December 2005.

In August 2008, I changed my static HTML business site into a WordPress site and blog. After writing my first post, it wasn’t long until I became active in the blogosphere. I then signed up for Twitter and StumbleUpon, where I became very active and started my ongoing love affair with social media.

Along the way, I was a power Digger for 2 years, became a power Stumbler, co-founded a niche SEO voting community and have been very active in numerous other social communities across the web. If you can name a social media website, I have probably been there!

It is all these years of experience in the SEO and social media worlds that have made it possible for me to get MySEOCommunity off the ground.

About Our Team

I have carefully selected all of the MySEOCommunity team members. Aside from being people I know well and trust completely, they are all professionals and entrepreneurs within the SEO/SEM industry. Like me, they’re all in the trenches on a daily basis and have managed to come out on top of this crazy industry. Who better than those among the  best and brightest in the industry to be at the foundation of the next up and coming SEO community?

What Makes MySEOCommunity Unique?

We don’t ever expect to be all things to all people. However, we are building a new kind of mousetrap. That means that we have a clear vision of who we are and where we are going.

One of the reasons we’re not a standard voting style community is every submission we receive will be moderated. As a result, we’re not going to accept every submission for publication just because it has been submitted and is on-topic.

The main reason is when I was operating a niche SEO voting community, one of the most common complaints we would get is that the submissions were “low quality.” Although we would respond with “as long as the submissions are on-topic, they will be allowed,” I can see the validity of this complaint from a user perspective.

Looking back, it really doesn’t make sense to allow every single submission to be published. This simply makes it too easy for people to take advantage of free links instead of actually contributing to the community.

Another key feature that makes us unique is our homepage isn’t determined by voting. During my previous SEO community experience, I found that not many people actually vote. Instead, what we commonly saw were small groups of friends who would vote up each others’ content. This meant that the homepage didn’t actually represent the very best submissions.

Social Buzz vs Voting

It’s no secret that the popularity of social “buzz” and “signals” has led to them being incorporated into organic SERPs. Because I believe this trend is only going to continue, it makes sense to use the same kind of metrics to determine what submissions make it to our homepage.

We are going to be doing with with the help of WebSEOAnalytics.com and their WuzzRank calculator. Here’s a brief explanation of how it works:

“The WuzzRank is a special rank that measures the popularity of a particular page or article on the various Social Media and it uses a logarithmic scale from 0-10. The word Wuzz comes from the words Web + Buzz. The WuzzRank is the PageRank equivalent for Social Media Reputation.”

Although it would be silly to say that WuzzRank is the “be all and end all” way to measure quality, we do think it’s going to work quite well with our method of moderating submissions. Instead of forcing our users to take time out of their day to click a vote button, we’ll be able to gauge interest by using signals from their existing Twitter, Facebook and G+ activity.

Guest Blogging Contests

We’re going to have quarterly guest blogging contests. We will also have other guest blogging opportunities, as well ongoing spots for contributors who have what it takes to put together killer posts.

Additionally, we have lots of cool things up our sleeves. However, I don’t want to ruin the surprise, so just stay tuned for some really cool updates.

Be sure to sign up for MySEOCommunity subscribe to our blog and Follow us on Twitter @MySEOCommunity so you won’t miss out on any of the awesome things we’re going to roll out in the coming months! PS: We are also on Google Plus and Facebook!