A Phraseologist

This is not a blog where I air my concerns or interests of any kind. All I am looking to do is uncover what I see happening in the background where one might normally not look.

Everyday I am confronted with articles from Google, search results, news, blogs - and every day the content leaves me wondering how it got there, and where is it going. As an SEO, my role is no longer to optomize the search engine. It seems to be doing whatever it does without question. Instead we should all be helping the search engine do its job better. Right now I truly believe there is only one search engine, Google. That doesn't mean I don't use Yahoo or MSN or ASK or any of the other myriad of options still out there. But the reality is if a client wants to get placed - anywhere - he is looking at Google optimization for his keywords. More than likely he is also looking at Adwords for his terms.

True keyword optimization comes at a hard cost - whether we pay the piper or the geek in the backoffice who plays with words. Having gone the piper route too often and sometimes getting burned I have opted to slide over to the geekier side - those who seek the meaning behind the words, the ways in which they are propogated and the form and function that follow the hunt for words.

It has become nearly impossible to get yourself to the highest level on a single word without Adsense. Most one-word domains, with their one-word corporations, and fifty-headed dragons, are all but lost to the highest bidders - which will never be us. We can take acronyms, compound words, multiple words of sorts and a few niche areas that haven't been exploited. But even if we were to wipe the domain gobblers, corporate slurry and bots off the planet we'd still be competing in general for nearly inaccessable webspace.

So now we are no longer keyword optimizers, we're phrase optimizers. No single word remains for us to light upon our match. And Phraseology is born.