As a solo founder, what's the best way to do (whitehat) SEO in the modern era?
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Syndication with rel=canonical pointing to the real page is great at garnering traffic and links that would otherwise be difficult to earn, especially if it's on a 'media' site. People are more willing to tweet/like/blog and link to a link from a publisher than they are to a non-publishing business, even if that corporation is just using the site as a sock puppet. As a solo founder, you should do that yourself, so long as you're not terrible and the stuff that you write is useful to your target customers.
RG's not the best example of white hat, given that they recently got hammered for a brazen paid link scheme.
The way I'd put it is that there is no such thing as a free link. You either pay the linker under the table as in most black hat arrangements, or you pay to put in the effort to create something worth linking to. Either way people are getting paid, even if it's in sweat.
Seriously, the best thing you can possibly do is just write great content around your subject. Don't try tricks and other special techniques, because Google simply doesn't want you to succeed using them.
You can help your content by making use of proper HTML that is SEO-optimized, but in the end making something people want to read is the best tactic.