This is just for a bit of fun … see if you can identify yourself or others from the following list. I don’t have much SEO advice, everything I learned I did from great sites like this one, so you already know it, but I wanted to put something back, in a light-hearted tone. Having spent months on blogs and forums learning everything I could about SEO for my own site I noticed a few patterns of specific types of SEO’ers, those people who commented on or ran the blog/forum etc. what they said, and how they said it, so I thought I would share my categories with you. Feel free to add any categories of SEO’ers I have missed out.
Categories Of ‘Search Engine Optimisers’.
The Wrestler: SEO to you is all about the struggle. You don’t mind getting in the ring with bigger guys because your technique is good, and you’re nimble – the jobs and clients are coming in off the back of a growing reputation. You love networking at SEO conferences; and the bluster and bragging rights after a good match up, either wining or loosing against your opponent, is all part of the game. Number 1 is everything, number 2 is nowhere.
Pros: You are not frightened of taking on the big guys, and you have a good win ratio.
Cons: The struggle is everything; the client, or boss, is secondary.
The Silver Back: You’re the 500lb Gorilla, and there are not many of you in the SEO forest. You were first in this business, back when it didn’t even have a name, and you are now number one in your field. The people working for you respect you and you define this business. When you move against the lesser silver backs, those trying to take your clients place in the SERPs, or those ridiculing one of your original theories that you made your name on, you are swift and decisive.
Pros: With your experience everything goes your way, you have major influence as an SEO expert and people respect you.
Cons: Time is the great leveller, it’s a young person’s game, keeping up with everything new is draining and eventually you will have to step down, and this worries you … but it’s not yet. Neutral: with so much confidence you sometimes take risks others wouldn’t.
The Chess Player: You always think three moves ahead. Cool, calm, and armed with statistics you plan everything in SEO using ‘best practice’. You are patient enough to see real results over several months before worrying about whether implementing something is going to work out or not. You rarely second guess yourself, having faith in the data sheets in front of you. Rankings and the number one SERP spot is something to be coldly analyzed, not fought over. You calculate that each little thing you do has a knock on effect, and these are cumulative, and they always go in your favour.
Pros: Unlike most people in SEO your standards are higher, you have the ability to use and understand the data in front of you, and the data never lies, it always works out in your favour in the end.
Cons: you can often miss a small window of opportunity a more intuitive player would react to; your boss can get frustrated with you in a time critical business, and you are frustrated that SEO is not taken more seriously.
The Assassin: You work alone, and are not high profile, but you’re no nickel and dime outfit either. Clients find you by word of mouth and they pay good money for your services … and your client list would make very interesting reading. You do one thing and one thing well, SEO. You take down the number one site on a search engine results page and replace it with your client’s. But you have no loyalty, next week, if asked, and paid, you’ll bring down your old client for your new client. You were once a good chess player, and the ultimate professional, you understand the stats, but your ambitions were always greater than just working for someone else. Now you get your hands a little dirty, dirtier than when you were a Chess Player; ‘best practice’ is now doing whatever it takes. You run multiple test websites and compute the variables of new search techniques, black hat, white hat, whatever works.
Pros: You are your own boss, and you make good money.
Cons: Loyalty is a two way street, and you might suffer from overconfidence, you think you’re not breaking enough Search Engine rules to get caught, but perhaps, one day …
The Street Fighter: To wake up you have your morning alarm play ‘Eye OF The Tiger’. SEO is not a nice business, it is a bruising business with a lot of competition. You are new to the game, inexperienced and self-employed, but willing to train hard and learn new things quickly. You operate on gut feelings, statistics are just not your thing, someone else does the book work for you. Client turnover is quick, small change for small beer – you just need the one break, the big opportunity to work with a big company to prove yourself and make it in the SEO world.
Pros: It’s at the street level that you learn things, the good and bad techniques, what works and what doesn’t, and when you make it to the big time, you’re going to have all that wealth of experience behind you.
Cons: You need to find enough small clients that will keep food on the table, so that you can make it with a career in SEO.
The Poker Player: The image of Janus, the two headed Roman God of January, is on your lucky charm. Outwardly you are ‘white hat’ to the world, if you blog about SEO you always tell people to stick to the rules, inwardly though you play a mean game of ‘black hat’. Bluffing is an art form to you, even your boss or clients don’t know how you get the results you do, but they are willing to pay you, and pay you well, without asking too many questions. You were once a Street Fighter, but you are all grown up now – the world of SEO suddenly made sense when you realised that you were the only one playing by the rules.
Pros: You know all of the tricks, white hat, black hat, you even invented some of them yourself.
Cons: You know the risks, which ones to take, which ones to leave, but just how good a poker player are you?
The Surfer Dude: Chill man, it’s only a nine to five job, five days a week, just like the postman. These are the college graduates that see SEO as a job, nothing more nothing less. What excites them is what they do for fun on the weekends. They do their job well, but SEO might not be a permanent career move; after all they just stumbled into it in the first place.
Pros: There is more to life than SEO, and stopping to smell the roses once in a while is a good way to live.
Cons: You’re never going to be rich or your own boss.
The Guardian Angel: Innocence is your weapon of choice. You work with your boss or client in the most professional manner; you have no time for black hat stuff. You don’t do risk, and the top companies work with you or hire you because of this; particularly if they have had a bad experience using someone else. You are not in the game for the short haul, reputation and career are everything to you, and they are a means to an end. You have been climbing the ladder of success for some time now, and the one thing you learnt is that shady tricks are actually pointless, apart from a quick fix. You know that over time a company using a rock solid, clean profile SEO strategy will get to the top of the search engines and stay there.
Pros: You are very good at SEO, and many people want to work with you, you have built a great CV and reputation.
Cons: You are most likely to say, ‘But Google wants us to …. ’ (insert anything and everything Matt Cutts has ever said).
The Excited Rabbit: Like rabbits there are millions of them. You are young and have a blog/website, and you want to make money off it, and you have heard about SEO making this possible. You go on the wrong types of SEO blogs/forums and discuss with other Excited Rabbits about getting an adsense click for $9. You look excitedly at your website every time a Page Rank update occurs, while everything about you, including your blog/website is unprofessional and smacks of being an amateur. For whatever reason Google has allowed you to put adsense on your site and you think this is your big break. You constantly ask for SEO help, but never read the articles or implement best practice after it has been pointed out to you. You quickly realise that making good, original content and understanding true SEO takes hard work, you either stop blogging or start scraping, and then Google bans you from adsense, so you moan on about it on the blog sites with all the other banned rabbits.
Pros: None.
Cons: You start down the spam route and become a scraper. Neutral: It makes the rest of us look better.
The Scraper: You were born cursed, and the world owes you a living. You started out as an Excited Rabbit, but became disillusioned with how easy you thought it was going to be. In the beginning you only did scraping once or twice, to help get people to your blog, but the temptation to keep doing it proved too much for you in the end. To you SEO means ‘Steal Everything Out-there’.
Pros: You are too lazyto remove embedded links to the original site in the copy you stole.
Cons: You are the cause of Google and other search engines being so opaque.
The Teacher: You don’t just do SEO, you teach SEO. Although SEO is something you do part time, you would love to do it as a full time job. You are happiest when you are in the online world, posting on blogs and offering SEO help and advice, even to Excited Rabbits. You have your own SEO blog, it is moderately successful with some reputation in the field, and you rank well for some competitive keywords under SEO. You want eventually to publish an ‘eHow To’ book on SEO and make money off it, although you worry that it is now an over-crowded market. You get a thrill if your blog gets a mention by someone, well, anyone … and you dream of guest speaking at SEO conferences.
Pros: You help the newbies out and offer great advice on the internet; some of the people you help out will make it big, and perhaps mention your blog.
Cons: The people you help out are making it big, but what about you, what are you doing in the real world?
The Cook: You blend everything together, a little bit of this and a little bit of that, in your SEO strategy. To you practice makes perfect, you try and improve one ingredient at a time, see how it turned out, then move on to the next one. You look at other people’s recipes for success and you try to copy them, perhaps altering something along the way, because you can’t stop yourself from tinkering. You are good on your feet, a quick thinker, and an intuitive SEO’er; and you also like to keep your eye on the latest opportunities.
Pros: Perhaps the best Cooks make the best SEO’ers.
Cons: You have to be very, very good, otherwise following this strategy you will never be anything other than average.
The Wizard: You are older and wiser than most of your competitors. You used to have patience too, but that left a long time ago, perhaps after the ten thousandth time you were asked by someone new to SEO if Pagerank was important or not. You rarely go on blogs anymore, but you do get interviewed frequently for your views on SEO by important journals; you also get asked to do guest speaker slots at conferences. Anyone other than those closest to you think all of your results in the SEO field are as a result of ‘magic’ and not hard work. You don’t mind the ‘magic’ tag as it brings in important, high profile clients looking for a bit of your sparkle to put on their brand or website.
Pros: Few match you for what you do.
Cons: Few believe you when you say it is because of hard work.
The Apprentice: You are an apprentice to a Wizard – learning at the feet of the master. You respect everything the Wizard says and try to implement those things you have been taught. Having someone knowledgeable to teach you the best ways of influencing SERPs means you build a very impressive knowledge base, and working with a Wizard means it looks good on your CV should you move on to another job or go solo.
Pros: You will never have a better opportunity to learn from the best.
Cons: Not all apprentices make the grade and move up to the next level.
The Matrix Specialist: Even more so than the Chess Player, numbers are your thing. You are the rare beast in SEO, someone who looks at a spread sheet of analytic data and sees life there, not numbers. You try to explain your findings, but few people can keep up, let alone understand you. However, so impressive do you come across that you get to do anything you want in implementing SEO strategy – your client/boss nods and does exactly what you say, taking everything on trust.
Pros: You are the sort of person a good client or boss likes to surround themselves with, it makes them look clever and you get cut a lot of slack.
Cons: Sometimes, most times, people just don’t get what you are trying to tell them – and you have the power to take over the world, if you wanted to.
The Adventurer: The wide open seas and flat plains of the SEO world are just opening up to you. You are at that stage where everything has ‘clicked’; you are no longer a newbie and you have avoided the pit falls of the Excited Rabbit; you now understand both the science and magic of what professional SEO means. You are eager to start implementing an SEO strategy on your own site, or for a new client, or in a new job. This is the new world, with great possibilities, and eagerness is your trump card, willingness your shield against adversity.
Pros: You have seen the case-studies, some people make it, and they make it big, or have great careers; like in the old-west, there are great opportunities for those ready and able to fight for what they want.
Cons: Do you really have what it takes, or are you like the majority, do you look at how ‘lucky’ other people are and get disheartened easily when things don’t move quickly enough?
The Waterboy: You wanted to be the star quarterback but instead ended up as the SEO waterboy. The company that hired you knew they needed someone at the company to do this new fangled SEO work, but no one there knows what SEO really is, and so no one really wants to follow your advice. You keep showing them the numbers, highlighting and outlining incredible SEO strategies, (taking months to design, using pretty Power Point Presentations and everything) and every time they tell you, ‘they will think about it’ and nothing changes.
Pros: It’s all experience, pick your moment and move on.
Cons: It might be so frustrating working there that it knocks your confidence in SEO.
An S.E.O.S.O.B. Yes, it stands for ‘Search Engine Optimising Son Ofa Bitch’, but also for their motto, ‘Search Engine Optimising – Sh*t Or Bust’, because its BLACK HAT ALL THE WAY BABY! You own an ever expanding empire of MFA sites and you do whatever it takes in the short term to rank on search engines to earn money from pointless sites with no real content, at least not original content, manipulating search results for competitive key words that generate the most income. You employ the scrapers, and you are their role model, they want to grow up to be just like you.
Pros: The money I hear is good.
Cons: err, erm, err …well, you really shouldn’t be doing it.
The Pretender: You are the person who applied for the new-job-opening in your company for an SEO expert, because the pay was better. A night of cramming the books, a bit of blagging at the interview, and the job was yours. You don’t really know what you are doing, but then again neither does anyone else at the company. You get to go on all the SEO conferences as part of your job training, but you see this as more of a way to get off work.
Pros: You never know you might just be good at it; you might even be able to go solo and pick up clients willing to pay you serious amounts of money.
Cons: Depending on the company, and your desire to learn, this is only a short term position you can hold.
You’re Matt Cutts: The main face and voice of Google for SEO.
Pros: You get invited everywhere to chat about SERPs, thus getting you out of the office; you must get to turn down huge sums of money for insider dealing propositions, (what’s the biggest ever?); at least you know your own blog is going to rank well.
Cons: Like Cassandra, no one believes a word you say, it’s all a conspiracy …
