SEO-Ward

In the SEO world, the word “awesome” is thrown around like Charlie Sheen throws round coke and hookers, I’m guilty of it myself especially at the recent Searchlove conference (using the word awesome, not the coke and hookers before anybody suggests otherwise) but recently I’ve been wondering whether we use it too much in SEO. I was reminded of this Eddie Izzard bit:

and you know what, I think he has a point, we’ve taken to using the word awesome to mean:

• That’s quite clever
• Good use of programming skills to achieve a desired outcome
• I managed to create links by undertaking this simple process
• That’s kinda neat

So what is worthy of awe in the SEO world?

In my opinion, if I’m truly honest with myself, not a lot.

There are a lot of people that are worthy of respect in the SEO world, the pioneers of our industry. Those that help us be understood as an industry. What some of these people can do is impressive and very clever, they live and breathe our industry and a lot of them are very groovy people to spend some time and have a beer with but i would say they’re more “kinda cool”, the SEO Hipsters if you will than truly awesome.

There are tried and tested techniques and processes and the experiments that people run to see if what we think works “actually works” – Again that’s kinda cool, is it truly awesome though, worthy of awe?

There’s impressive tools that can give you unbelievable data on a url in a heartbeat, who links, how powerful, what’s it about, who do they link to, who owns the domain etc etc etc….Very impressive stuff and you can admire the tool’s designers and what they’ve achieved, but the tools themselves aren’t really awesome.

I would say donating time and resource and SEO skill to a small budget-constrained charity which then increases their donations by 500% and saves lives…Now that would be awesome! (and I’m happy to say that there are a number of SEO companies doing just that)

So I hereby swear on a printed copy of Google’s webmaster guidelines that I will not use the term awesome  from now on, unless it truly is worthy of awe!

About Jim Seward

Jim Seward has written 37 post in this blog.

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