Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Can they find you?

I am so burnt. I spent yesterday tearing around in the car, meeting with people, getting contracts signed, picking up merchandise – all good things. But then I hit the computer last night to attempt a task that left my head and eyeballs aching.

I had to choose keywords for my site. There ought to be combat pay for having to choose keywords for your site. Those of you who have worked in journalism will understand when I say it was like thinking up 25 two-and three-word headlines for a single edition. 

I had to do this in order to assist someone who was assisting me with search optimization for Geniocity.com. Search optimization – or SEO, for my fellow Luddites – is one of those inescapable monetizing processes (IMPs) that the IT world guilts you into doing because you can’t afford not to (CANT). It takes significant words or short phrases describing and/or contained in the content of your site and embeds them or tattoos them or something somewhere in the endless digital forest of coding, so prowling search engines can pounce on them like, what? hounds? and drag them back to their mouse-clicking masters who desperately want to find sites about all-cotton underwear and what Sarah Palin eats for breakfast. (Moose muffins - duh.) 

And if you’re lucky and you did your keyword homework, they’ll find you and madly click on every page and ad and delightful collectible available for purchase on your site.       

Anyway, I did all this using the Google Adwords Keyword tool. Very handy, except, of course, that it turns up about 5,000 other variations, synonyms and related ideas for the words you’ve entered. I mean, that’s great, but you have to read them all - or most of them – and check the graphs that go with them to see which words or phrases get the most hits. It’s like reading all the varieties of Smith in the phone book and then measuring with a ruler to see how many of each kind there are so you know the most popular one to paint on your mailbox. Even though Smith isn’t your name. Or mine.

So now I’m legally blind or close to it. But I was focused and persistent and all sorts of good business-y things and got my keywords picked. And now I think I’ll spend the morning in a darkened room with cucumber slices on my eyelids (or maybe zucchini if we’re out of cucumbers) and try to make the words creativity and innovation and creative innovation and innovative creativity and creations stop blobbing and dividing like amoebas in my head.

Have I ever got a keyword for anybody who tries to find me today.