I worked for a few companies that took SEO very seriously, and my conclusion is that it's all a lot of verbal hocus-pocus. Traditional advertising is still the best way to get people's attention and draw it to your site, product etc.
And also: thank you. I'd never heard of this We Work Remotely site, but I think it may have the kind of jobs a (currently unemployed and immobilized) friend may be suited to!
TBH, I'm this close to blocking all search engines from crawling my website. I'm not convinced that being accessible to search engines is actually beneficial to people running personal websites.
Ugly Duck: Dear Google, I'm Blocking You From My WebsiteI'm closer to falling in love with walled gardens so long as I get to build the wall.
I suppose that sounds like at least first cousin to "privilege" to some. But having just passed into yet another irrevocable decade of life, the phrase "life's too short" seems increasingly fitting just before the phrase "to suffer fools"....
I see no reason people can't have their own homes on the internet. I don't let any random stranger come to my physical home and lecture me on my shortcomings as a human being, and I feel no obligation to let randos do that to me on my website or by email.
Of course, venturing into shared spaces like IRC or the Midnight and saying something foolish or offensive is another thing entirely. There's a reason people used to say "lurk more" online. You've got to read the room.
A good friend and part-time web dev person put it best- 'SEO is the used car salesmen of the internet'
I must admit being tired of the tires kicking me. :-)
Let's repurpose it- Search Engine Obfuscation; when you are looking for things so arcane and obscure that even Google is stumped.
I could also go with "Seems Elusively Optimistic".
I mean... is it possibly time for the first annual Midnight Pub SEO acronym repurposing contest, or *what*?!??! :-)
I remember buying an "SEO Made Simple" book in 2009 because I wanted my blog to have better rankings on Google. It was about 50 pages, full of typos, and in the end it ended up doing more harm than good, probably. I never really dug too deep into the subject/practice of it, though. I figure people can read my blog if they like, if they can't find it (or don't stumble across it) life still goes on :)
SEO, come to think of it, is a lot like Bitcoin: it's the solution to every single problem under the sun. End-all, be-all, cure-all. Now if/when Elon Musk starts up a SEO company that pays in Bitcoin - well, let's just say the whole epidemic of war/disease/famine/poverty will be a thing of the past, and we can all be Bitllionaires who are absolved of the nasty (past-tense) condition of what we called "suffering".
Hope you're doing well, Inquiry :)