It all started with my 99 character SEO seminar, in which I challenged the bloated world of search engine optimization (SEO) with just a few simple rules which had always worked for me:

(1) Write compelling content. (2) Use descriptive headlines. (3) Link judiciously. (4) Get linked.

Josh (whom some of you may know better as “cortex” from MetaFilter) took mock-umbrage at my pretenses to expertise, and responded that my advice would cause “your website’s face to explode” — his claim to authority being an SEO level of “over 9000” (a satirical Dragonball-Z reference popularly used in imageboard circles). Sure enough, within hours his Flickr photo and weblog entry were at the top of Google for the term — though of course, no one else had ever before said that his SEO levels were over 9000 till now.

So I’m taking my own SEO advice and making the term more relevant by writing compelling content about the issue, with a relevant headline and a sprinkling of informative links. There’s also an associated video (really just a mildly tweaked rehash of the original “Over 9000” clip, with a description that of course links back to this entry). If I’m right, this should rocket to the top of Google in a day or so, showing cortex who his SEO daddy is.