I noticed your post, it was quite alot to get through so I have earmarked some-time later tonight when I have some downtime.
Yes, I agree that starting posts with "Hey Steemians" has no external appeal to drive SEO traffic, I didn't actually consider that, thanks for pointing it out. Luckily my post starts with a sentence referring to the Apple keynote which should be fine for that purpose.
Sure I would be happy to curate externally focussed content, however I would need to either auto-follow a curation team or be linked the posts by some sort of notification service as I am generally too busy to seek out posts to vote.
Regarding SEO not caring about Steem trending vs non-trending, I inserted an edit stating that, however I still believe trending is a good reflection fo what our community likes to write about and in any event if someone comes to Steem via a non-trending normie type post and then takes a look at trending overrun with crypto articles, it may not appeal to them, communities will solve that though..
Good stuff! And yes it is quite long, but hopefully well worth the read and can result in many spin-off conversations on how to improve Steem at many levels.
I'll get back to you in more detail on how we will do these competitions. I have a few neat solutions.
Also while on this topic, I think it is worth bringing up the value of comments and engagement on Steem. If I write a comment to someone on Steem, it brings their attention back there to read it, which helps Steemit make money. It also makes it more likely they'll then go curate some people or engage with some content as a result of me bringing their attention back to a Steem front-end with my comment, which then again feeds that same loop. So another idea would be to encourage more of the conversations we have on slacks, discords, and elsewhere to take place on Steem if possible. And to do our best to encourage and incentivise good engagement.
Actually yes you and I both are on the same page regarding on-chain chats that we have in slack. Remember I even created the https://neosteem.com forum with all sorts of developer, marketing, witness and governance categories. Forums are also nice for quicker discussion threads, but no-one in slack wanted to embrace it, pretty much a solid day of structuring wasted. I think most people in Slack feel comfortable in there.
Big domains are very unlikely to link to link to steemit for those sort of topics. SEO is less about keywords and much more about authority given to content from linking domins. It may help rank very far down the SERP but at that level it may as well not exist...