Over the years the search engine marketing industry has developed quite a bit of slang that some people understand and others simply don’t make any sense of. As the industry grows and cleans it’s self-up a bit certain words give the wrong connotation to the practice of marketing a website online which I wish would sort of disappear.

Years ago SEO/SEM was approached like a numbers game accompanied by a tactic that looked a lot like a science room project. Formulas do not grow a business! Marketing grows a business and I think as a whole we are all starting to realize that a 1,000 directory submission “blast” is not going to cut it when trying to spread a company image online.

Here are some slang words in our industry that I wouldn’t mind to see disappear:

• Anything with the word “blast” in it – Blast in my impression implies easy and quick and marketing a website is more about quality and strategy than anything else. Nothing strategic about throwing a can of paint at the wall and hoping something sticks. If you are interested in hiring a company to market your business and the word “blast” dominates the content you should run the other way.
• SEO packages – I wouldn’t mind seeing SEO packages disappear either. Every website/company is going to have its own approach on how to brand their company name. Sort of like DNA no two marketing strands are ever the same.
• Alexa ranking – Nothing like bringing an out of touch dinosaur to the modern marketing game. Alexa was beneficial at the turn of the century but there have been many new advancements in this area since the late 90’s.
• PageRank – In my opinion PageRank is one of the single factors so many website owners have a skewed vision on how to market a website. Some people got so caught up with increasing that number that I think they forget that they are marketing a business.
• Hits – Unique visitors…OK, website traffic…OK, hits are something you do with your head against the wall when you get a Google penalty from buying an “SEO blaster package”.
• Link Building – I’m on the fence with this one but I think people tend to misunderstand the concept because they tend to become fixated on the actual link and not the big picture surrounding the link…the branding & marketing stuff.
• No hats allowed – There should just be right and wrong. No white or black hat just the process of using your judgment and thinking about whether your approach is right for your business or whether it is wrong for your business.
• Cloaking – Cloaks should only be referred to when discussing scenes in a Harry Potter movie.

I think I dislike the thought process surrounding some of these words a bit more than the word itself. I think what happens with some of these slang words is that some website owners tend to associate the wrong picture surrounding the search engine optimization industry from these slang words. Either they are using tools that simply have no foundation to them or they are missing the bigger picture to SEO.