SEO is Not an Airport in Southeast Asia (So What Else is New, Pussy Cat?)

Recently, I applied for a job that required both writing and marketing skills. I thought I could easily fake the writing skills (though apparently I could not) but I knew from the get go the marketing thing would be an uphill battle.

Before I learned one of life's most basic truths, i.e. that in matters of love it's all about pleasant facial features, buoyant breasts, and perky butt cheeks, or, for purposes of this blog that will become clearer later, it's all about tits and ass, my mother taught me to rationalize away my unpopularity with boys by reassuring myself that I was simply too intimidating. As a matter of self preservation, I've fallen back on a bit of that kind of thinking each time I fail to land a job, but with age comes at least some wisdom and I know, deep down, it's not true. Frankly, this whole job search experience is starting to make me feel fat.

Still, I persevere, and continue to look inward so I may identify my shortcomings and, maybe one day soon, get the equivalent of a fat envelope in the mail from a prospective employer. My writing, I think, is as much a part of me as my crooked nose and my double jointed thumbs, and absent surgical intervention, it's not going to change any time soon. But marketing, that's something I can learn. I am no longer as behind the eight ball as I was when I first applied for the writing/marketing job; I at least know now that S.E.O. refers to search engine optimization, and not the airport in South Korea. I even sort of know what a search engine is, and I can guess what optimization is all about.

Which brings me to this blog post, which is really nothing more than a computer science experiment. It's not just my job search that's been making me feel fat; my blog stats are doing more than their fair share to make me feel like an ugly duckling. I can tell myself my prose is intimidating all I want, but, really, is that what keeps thousands of folks from stopping by for a quick read as they cruise through the blogosphere? I think not. It is time for some soul searching.

Well, not really soul searching so much as careful research, or at least a bit of scrolling. I scanned my list of posts, looking for the ones that, oddly, have thousands of hits (as opposed to the more typical two or three). The key to S.E.O. had to be buried somewhere within those posts. Not buried at all, as it turns out. The answers jumped out at me before I even needed to squeeze my eyes together and concentrate really hard. Genitals. Boobs. Vagina. Dick. Beef jerky. S.E.O. is all about key words, and the words that are most key are all about sex. Okay, I'm not sure about beef jerky, but I think the rest of examples are pretty solid.

Yes, back to the experiment. I want to see if peppering my prose with sex words will increase my readership. I thought calling the post something like Girl on Girl Sex or World's Largest Penis would be inappropriate, not to mention slightly misleading. So I took a more subtle approach with key words in the title (do the math, folks, I'm not going to discuss it further) and I'm hoping the tossing in of a laundry list of body parts throughout the body of the post will add some further optimization. And I'm going to wait and see whether I suddenly become popular, or whether no amount of S.E.O. can save me from the ugly truth about why nobody likes me.

No worries, loyal fans. I remain armed with rationalizations, like the quote one of you just sent my way:

“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” -William Gibson

Yep. Thousands and thousands of them.