This year I celebrate a decade of professional SEO practice that is offering SEO services. I’d like to share the most important lessons from each year.

Year One (2004 – 2005)

When everybody is looking down on you because you’re a beginner, find people to look up somewhere else.

I started out in SEO 10 years ago in Germany. As a former web developer, you’d assume that it wasn’t hard for me to get going. That’s true to some extent but I also struggled with many things. Those days were the days when there weren’t many resources to help you build up your knowledge-base quickly – at least in German. I wanted to buy a book on SEO and there was none in German.

The closest thing to an SEO book in German was Google Hacks, more like a guide for advanced searchers or programmers.

There was one chapter dealing with topics related to search engine optimization and I think the term SEO wasn’t even mentioned in it. There were no German SEO blogs yet. Blogs were still new and shiny. We had some established SEO forums already but the atmosphere there wasn’t very good.

There were a few gurus who were hiding their know-how to keep a competitive advantage. Others were almost as new and clueless as myself but nevertheless rude and often aggressive. When you asked the wrong question, you only got people to bash you. I quickly realized that it would hardly be a place for me. That’s how I discovered Rand Fishkin and some other guys who are still or more than ever well known for their advice and resources.

Year Two (2005 – 2006)

You can get propelled to stardom over night, but to stay on top is much harder.

The holy grail of German SEO practitioners to prove oneself back in those days was to rank for the German term for “search engine optimization” (“suchmachinenoptimierung”). I tried that by writing a series of articles for an independent but popular online magazine on culture and technology and ranked top 20 (I think #14 was the highest) with it quite fast just to realize that nothing happened.

Nobody wanted to work with me or something. I decided to aim a bit lower but be more specific. So I optimized my own site to rank for “search engine optimizer” instead, a phrase mostly ignored by everybody else for being too “small”. I didn’t plan to set up an agency so I was perfectly satisfied with the leads from that one. I got two or three every week after I ranked on #1.

One day a journalist from the largest Germany economic weekly found me that way and asked to interview me.

We talked for almost an hour and a few weeks later I got featured in a widely read magazine that business people were fond of. The article started with the sentence: “Tadeusz Szewczyk clears the way.” A flood of potential clients mailed and called me so that I was overwhelmed and couldn’t even send proper offers to all of them. Most of them were just curious and didn’t even consider working with me for real but nonetheless from then on I was already established in a budding industry.

Trying to get all those clients just resulted in too many half-hearted attempts so that most didn’t work out. I had to get clients the hard way again after that. At least I didn’t have to scour webmaster forums to find 300-Euro-per-project clients anymore after that #1 ranking and article.

Year Three (2006 – 2007)

Connecting with people can mean much more than generic rankings on Google.

When I started out in SEO, I was a firm believer in generic rankings on Google. Back then that philosophy also worked to a larger extent than today. Still it’s only a small part of a long-term success strategy. It’s not about getting new visitors from Google and thus low-quality leads. First-time visitors who don’t know much about you or what you do exactly won’t result in lucrative business. One of the most long-standing clients I was able to work with was a friend of a friend.

The friend I refer to was only an online friend. I have never even got a chance to speak to him on the phone, let alone meet him.

Nonetheless through a client found by guest blogging I stayed with him for 5 years. I gained trust of a popular German blogger writing in English for a global audience. It was Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped – one of the most popular blogs in the world back then according to Technorati. I didn’t even have a blog in English by that time. Philipp also let me jump-start my SEO 2.0 blog the same year by letting me guest post on his blog again.

Year Four (2007 – 2008)

Inspiring and helping people will make them appreciate and support you.

My early enthusiasm has led to online friendships and a lot of mutually beneficial relations that spurred my career. I have been very open-minded and hyperactive on early social sites so that I have “met” many people from the global Internet marketing industry. Bloggers, social media power users, and SEO experts of all kinds were kind enough to accept me as one of their equals even though I wasn’t even a native speaker of English.

The culture of sharing wasn’t as self-evident back then as it is now. Most people were hoarding their PageRank and only self-promoting.

In contrast, I was forthcoming in a natural way by sharing other people’s content and submitting it to old-school social sites. I was linking out on a massive scale even to so-called “competitors” of mine. All of that just led to increased visibility of myself and my own content. I didn’t even need to share it, other people did although I wasn’t a huge influencer or something.

Year Five (2008 – 2009)

When it comes to content creation, consistency leads to visibility and generosity is contagious.

Regular blog posts and huge resources lists with many outgoing links made me a blogging phenomenon in a small boring niche. I have been contributing to a few communities and writing for an SEO agency blog from the UK. The agency and their blog were basically non-existent when I got there. It just consisted of two people and some freelancers. I started writing for them regularly and established the blog back then with pretty exceptional list posts and weekly columns.

One-time visitors came back and stayed tuned. Many people who I linked to linked back and shared my content. The blog grew and grew.

I wrote so much for them that I didn’t even have the time anymore for my own blog. After all, I was successful with my writing? Who cares where it gets published? Also that way I didn’t have to care for business models and clutter my blog with ads. It was great to be part of the growing international “search and social” industry.

Year Six (2009 – 2010)

Blogging success can get tiresome when you’re not moving forward in any meaningful way.

I was still struggling financially despite my international blogging success. The blogging itself got tedious. My frustration was growing while my own blog kept stagnating. I had no clear goals, plan or strategy.

Just writing and getting the word spread about my content became repetitive and pointless.

My client refused to pay me a bonus based on success while at the same time list posts became more widely spread so that my weekly 30+ resources lists became just one of many. I kept on doing what I did out of loyalty and for the easy money despite being significantly underpaid given not only my international repute but also the overall popularity of my content. I started using more and more tried out formulas and went for topics that already succeeded once. My posts weren’t as creative as before.

Year Seven (2010 – 2011)

Just when you think you have figured it all out, everything will change.

I had three successful business blogs running for clients, two for German clients among them. Between 2010 and 2011, all of them failed me in some ways. In all three cases, everything worked more than fine. There was seemingly no need to change a running system. I wasn’t that much ahead of the game anymore but who cared as long as everything was OK? I was so caught up with client work that I didn’t have my own projects I could control completely.

You need to control every aspect of a business to be able to steer it clear of muddy waters.

Having to report to clients who aren’t on top of the game and explaining to them what they need to do or at least to approve hasn’t worked for me. One after another, I have been forced to abandon all of the previously successful blogs. Some were my fault while other things could have been improved but the clients weren’t willing to change or were not able to implement the necessary changes. Only your own projects can guarantee you the freedom to cope with changing tides.

Year Eight (2011 – 2012)

Failure on Google can break you free from inner constraints.

At the end of 2011, my own blog SEO 2.0 has been penalized by Google. I suspected that was the Panda update but I was never able to confirm with certainty. At some point I stopped caring. After all, the purpose of my blog was to prove that you could thrive without Google. SEO 2.0 was about relationships and multiple traffic sources, social media foremost among them. Why did I fall into the trap of Google dependency? I even castrated my fanciful headlines in order to add boring keywords to them.

Refocusing is about identifying and nurturing your core strengths rather than about fulfilling Google’s demands.

After I won the UK search awards for “best SEO blog” without ever touching the trophy or even getting notified about it, I wanted to quit blogging for third parties. I did for a while and only found another exploitative publisher. At least I charged twice what I did prior to be sacked by my award winning blog client.

There I was, disowned by the UK blog I made the “best” and left with a shattered blog of mine that Google dropped almost altogether in its results. My attempts at reviving it didn’t work as intended and I wasn’t really fond of having to please Google. I rediscovered writing for real people instead.

In the end I fed two birds with one grain by writing for others again but not just one client so that Google couldn’t stop me by demoting any publication and I wouldn’t wind up dependent on a publisher again either. You could read my articles all over the place since then and publishers were proud to work with me instead of hiding that very fact.

Year Nine (2012 – 2013)

Creative writing is not scalable so that you need to come up with something that uses the advantage of the Internet and technology.

The more I succeeded at writing about SEO and adjacent topics for clients, the more they wanted me to write for their blogs. Sadly I discovered that I couldn’t write more than one blog post a day, even if it was just half of it.

In short, content creation is not scalable in case it’s just about creative writing by one single person.

Ideally, technology and automation mean that you have less work to do yourself. Only the fun should be left in theory. Everything else can be done by algorithms. Unlike in the real world, anything shared on the Web will get multiplied automatically. So why not create something that will work for itself instead of working yourself all the time?

I have started writing an e-book, finally, after all those years. Spreading the word about me and my writing for free or by paid client work doesn’t scale unless I have a product that will be sold through that popularity. Even in case I’d give away the e-book for free, the Internet would take care of promotion for me so that I’d get even more publicity that I could use to sell something else. Just offering services doesn’t suffice.

Year Ten (2013 – 2014)

You are never a seasoned expert nowadays because you have to keep pace with developments on the Web.

I was never too proud to look up to people younger than me or to learn from those who have started out later in the same industry. Just because you have done something for a decade doesn’t mean you are better than someone who just came out of nowhere.

The Web does not make you an expert just by staying long enough. You have to adapt quickly enough to keep up with it.

One of my biggest inspirations has been Brian Dean of Backlinko. He did almost everything right when it comes to SEO plus blogging, and propelled himself to fame without making the same mistakes I had made a few years earlier. I was seriously thrilled and following him closely from the first day I discovered that guy.

In some new areas like App Store Optimization, I’m a complete newbie myself so that I am amazed by the know-how others already have especially in case they stem from unstable countries like Pakistan while I am living in one of the richest nations of the world with all the infrastructure advantages it entails.