Hi, that was definitely an SEO motivated decision.

I'm not quite sure about white/grey/black hat, but I felt it would be acceptable to link to my own startup with a keyword of my choosing.

It honestly never even crossed my mind that it might be considered anything less than above board. I'd be interested in feedback from other people if that is considered a taboo move.

He mentions his product in the beginning of the post. It had nothing to do with the post. Does that make the mention grey-hat PR?

Seriously...

The guy took the time to write a solid post about his experience. An experience that will help him out.

For free.

Least he can do to reward himself (and us accept) is the use of the most advantageous anchor texts for links in his post.

well there are two other places in the blog that has "Rocket Lease" linked to the site. It seems like he used a good linking style for the context in that first sentence. It allowed him to highlight the startup name with bold first (rather than having it be just another link on the page) followed by a brief description of the product as the link. It flows.

I found it more odd that the logo on the right just links to the image rather than the site. But that might be for a reason I'm not privy to.

I forgot that you can link images. Thanks for pointing that out... Just started blogging so I forget stuff like that.

Fixed.

I disagree. If you can't link from your blog to your startup however you want, we're all in trouble.

That he prefers it to rank for the type of thing that it does vs. its name is absolutely the choice of the author. I don't see anything 'grey hat' about having an understanding of SEO.

That you admit that "it's good SEO" then question it is puzzling to me. Is there a reason I the author should prefer to use bad SEO on his personal blog?

Good SEO is targeted towards computers rather than humans. In the case of this newsletter-style post, potential customers would probably want to click the product name to get more details, rather than clicking a series of words which might lead to the product web site or might lead to a Wikipedia page or something else. Since it was the first instance of the product name, I would have expected it to be linked. Hence, the potential grey-hat. Not a big deal, I was just curious what people thought.

"Good SEO is targeted towards computers rather than humans."

You're obviously not very good at SEO or else you'd know this is completely untrue.