Whalespeak

A lot of SEO is about putting the cart before the horse. Traffic before content.

Recently, some SEOs have been creating fake stories and articles as a way of increasing eyeballs on their product or service.

I think this has got a bit backwards.

SEO used to be about stuffing keywords and amassing links by any means necessary. But as these things have become less important and filtered out by the important search engines, the internet marketers have turned to linkbait and viral campaigns.

The reason Google doesn’t want your ability to crank widgets to affect the ranking of your website is that it makes Google useless. It’s not that they are promoting ethics necessarily, they just want to build a tool that provides useful, relevant, interesting or timely content to users. And they want to do that because (drum roll) that’s what users want. Users like you and me.

When it gets to the point that SEOs are creating fake content to lure people to their sites, isn’t it just a whisker further to get that content to be real? Or at least relevant?

The cart before the horse is this: you’re trying to get higher traffic so you create something that will pull in the numbers. Wrong. You create something useful, relevant, interesting or timely and you will get traffic. And the great thing is, for as long as search engines are around, that will always work.

You can download Firefox here. I’m just about to.

I was reading through the archives of Veerle’s excellent design blog, when I came across a post about her sending out her CV as a kind of package. The funny thing is that most advice about job-hunting steers you away from being this imaginative.

When you’re writing your CV, it’s easy to get bogged down in details. What is going to make the most impact? Which font, how much line-spacing, what order to put everything in?

The best CVs are not CVs at all. They’re one of a kind and they break the rules. Sometimes they aren’t even about work or experience or qualifications. Sometimes they’re packages or blogs or gifts or paintings.

There’s the guy who sent a ransom note to Disney with a piece of Mickey Mouse’s ear. (Is this apocryphal? I can’t find a link.)

People who do the same as everybody else are great for companies who want a horde of drones. But you don’t really want to work for that kind of company do you? The best way to stand apart, is to do what no one else has done. Don’t be afraid to stand out. Why do you think the word is outstanding?

If you’re worried about what your CV will look like to the person that’s hiring you, ask yourself how you would react, put yourself in the mind of the recruiter. The truth is that the best people to work for are human and humans love things that are extraordinary. There’s very little extraordinary.