Turn something you do into something everyone wants

Seth Godin’s blog this morning entitled “Better than free”  just validates my thought these past couple weeks that I need to work on finding ways to make an existing idea, something everyone should want.

Right now, one of those things is SEO .  I am learning it and working with some folks who do it well.  The actual thing of it is a limited “want”.  Limited to those who get it.  Everyone creating content or selling a service or product should want it.  Even if they’re just people who have a personal blog that wants to be discovered.  But because of popular opinion on the internet, SEO is a dirty word and means (in the minds of many) something bad.  Even two of the top expert sites on the subject have removed the word from their names.  Moz.com is one of them.  If you don’t know Moz, then do a Google search for “seo is a dirty word” and you’ll learn it’s not a new opinion.

We need a revolution.  

I’m seeing people offering SEO being ignored and people who talk about in the public social web being shunned.

What stuck with me from Seth’s blog post today was that if you really want to make something better than free and stand out, you should “reinvent and rebuild what you make for a new reality.”  What can we do to reboot this SEO thing and make it a new thing?

We can start by calling it something else.  Something people want to learn more about.

People who could really benefit from legitimate search engine optimization or internet content optimization (just something I’m throwing around) and don’t know what it really means think in only black hat terms, or they think something else, which isn’t what it really is.  Their minds hear/see ‘SEO’ and shut down because it aligns the word with negative things it recalls about it (whether they are true or not, they what’s perceived—and perception is everything, as you likely already know—and always wins over truth).