SEO, Sales, and Snake Oil

There's lotsa acronyms and jargon among gurus in any field. At it's best, it's a means for specialists to abbreviate while talking shop. More often, it's a way for people who have no idea what they are talking about to sound really top shelf and charge accordingly.

These are the snake oil sales people. In website development, "SEO" coming up within 10 minutes of discussion is the surest sign of a snake oil salesman. It's been the go-to jargon to sound knowledgeable for a decade and running. But what is it?

Guy I know who knows his stuff kept telling me, "Make your website responsive, jackass!"

When I did (to the best of my hobbyish abilities) he said, "Optimize your visual assets!" Actually, he said, "Make your damn pictures smaller."

And there's the first two steps to your "SEO."

Proper use of header tags ... yep.
Enable browser caching, compress data, minimize script ... getting into stuff I don't know much about, but YEP. Good SEO there! Wish I could do more of that on my Yahoo/Aabaco server.

Original and useful content, keyword optimized ... sure, that's what I do. But we're already on the springboard the snake oil people use to launch into all sorts of jargony, gury nonsense.

By the time they start getting into selling you 2nd and 3rd domains, microsites, and a bunch of anything else that takes your audience FURTHER from where you want to go, farther and more expensively from the heart of what you intended to accomplish or your call to action ... you know you're being taken for a ride, right?

And guess who you're going to pay to manage that noise? That same salesperson whose card you have filed away somewhere will show up with a concerned smile and a solution. Probably some commission-worthy jargon too.


Bryan Lindenberger works in digital content development, including over eight years in higher education and nonprofit.