Update & Disclaimer (May 7, 2010): Just to let you know, I wrote this post a little in the heat of the moment. I in no way intend to offend anyone, and this should be taken as more of a satirical piece, rather than literal. The views expressed here are my own and in no way reflect the views of my company, People To My Site.
Yesterday, the SEO strategy that I am in the process of implementing with one of my clients was called “a disgrace” by a competing SEO.
This SEO who shall remain nameless (cough *Mike from Boston* cough), nearly caused me to “Hulk-Up” ala the great Hulk Hogan, but I resisted the urge (although I WAS shaking mad) and remained professional.
Now I understand the nature of the game and I get that with this economy that it is definitely a dog-eat-dog world, but that’s no excuse to act like a whining baby on a conference call and blame all the worlds ills on everybody but yourself.
Anyhow, I’ve given myself a day to cool down – but it’s still irritating me and I need to get all this venom out of my system. I hope you enjoy my rant on the 10 things I hate about SEO’s (mostly pertaining to SEO’s who’ve done work for a client in the past and are now barking about me doing work for said client via my company)…
1. There are a small percentage of slime-balls who ruin the industry for the rest of us. These guys take a client’s money, do a p*ss poor job of optimizing their client’s sites, and frustrate said client so much that they become too jaded to work well with the rest of us. So while I’m trying to work with a client and give them an SEO strategy that fits their needs, I’m also playing Dr. Phil because of their past bad experience. Thanks so much dick-wads!
2. Have data to support your arguments if you’re going to try to undercut me. Don’t just go to one off all willy-nilly saying that traffic or rankings are down without having evidence to prove that fact. Which leads me to…
3. Don’t just say rankings dropped without specifying a context. Which rankings dropped? For what keywords? Did you ever think that maybe we’re losing ground in some places to gain it in others? It’s called keyword re-targeting….try it sometime d*ckhead! And if you refuse to tell me which keyword dropped in rankings (or if it’s only one), how on earth am I going to be able to understand the context of what’s going on?
4. Don’t assume that my few changes are the reason that stuff went down or up. As any SEO knows, there are literally hundreds of factors that influence how a website ranks. Therefore, me changing three words in the title probably didn’t affect things as much as you claim. Look inward first!
5. Say “Keyword Density” one more time – I dare you! If I here another SEO try to undercut me by saying that my changes or strategies was ruining their keyword density, I might explode. Far be it for me to make a sentence that is more readable for a user (while still utilizing keywords I might add). I didn’t realize that by changing a sentence around to make it more readable, I was actually creating a massive void in the space/time continuum that would result in releasing red matter that might create a black hole to suck away your rankings.
6. Craft their SEO strategy around search engines and not users. Last time I checked, people use search engines and not robots. That means that mentioning your target keywords 10 times in the first two sentences isn’t helping anybody (cough * keyword idiot density * cough). And guess what, search engines like sites that help users – not sites that fake it by stuffing keywords!
7. Don’t tell me my campaign is “a disgrace” when you can only point out one tactic that you don’t like! Last time I checked, there’s more to optimizing a site than just editing the homepage title tag. I play on the big boy playground where we take a holistic approach to optimizing a website. Call me when you crawl out of the sandbox.
8. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. This means that I might take a different approach the you when optimizing a website. It means I might make different assumptions about research than you, might write differently, and might even like a different flavor of soda than you – imagine that. You should know by now that there are no “standards” in SEO, and although there are tactics that work better than others it is all still subjective. This means that although my tactics aren’t your tactics, they may still work better or worse.
9. To all gray-hats and cowboy SEO’s, no amount of crazy dynamic hidden content funky javascript interchanging title not quite white-hat not quite black-hat strategy is going to help you. I can at least respect Black-Hat SEO because they pick a side. If you’re going to do crazy stuff, just cross over to the world of Black-Hat and stop giving us White-Hat SEO’s a bad name. You’re cowboy SEO scripts are not wanted here!
10. And finally…don’t take credit for work you did not do! This one’s personal. I know that a third-party vendor did the original and ongoing SEO for the “disgrace”/website in question. Don’t tell me you were controlling their SEO strategy when I damn-well know the site is operated by a third-party vendor who wouldn’t trust Mother Teresa enough to let her in their back end. Thanks for being a douchebag.
– End Rant –
Thank you for your patience as I’m only human.
To all my readers:
Please feel free to add additional things that you hate about SEO’s (maybe even me – but I hope not). Let’s all get this negative energy out of our systems for good!
