Be Thankful

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22 01 2010

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This time of year is when most people reflect on their lives, where they’re at and where they want to be in the future. It’s also a time to reflect on the good things in their lives. I thought of a list of SEO things to be thankful for.

You know what SEO is! You’re already ahead of the curve if you run a website and know what SEO is. Even better if you know what the key elements of SEO are.
There are plenty of resources for SEO information. When I first started doing SEO almost 10 years ago, there was hardly any information available about what to do other than title, meta description, meta keywords and copy. Now we have other criteria to consider and plenty of resources, like the blogs at SEO.com, to get more information.
Great conferences to attend:
SES (Search Engine Strategies), PubCon, SMX (Search Marketing Expo), and Search eXChange. There are even international conferences now, which didn’t exist a few years ago.
It’s not boring. Things within the industry change quite often, so you constantly get to learn new techniques and tricks to help sites rank well in the search engines.
You can be creative. Being good in the SEO industry requires that you pay attention, think through what you’re doing, and try out new things. Testing to see what happens when you do a particular action is a great way to learn more about what works and what doesn’t. And testing in our industry doesn’t involve blood, animals, or human pain!
Sharing. It’s amazing to me how well we share with one another. When one person learns something new, they blog about it and teach others how to do it and what the impact of it will be. We even share our toys (also known as plug-ins and tools).
Learning a new language. Yeah, OK, we might be geeks, but we can be pretty dang interesting! At our Christmas party a group of us starting talking about SEO. The spouses started laughing because it didn’t make any sense to those outside of the industry.
Our industry is growing at a time when almost everything else is declining. What a great space to be in! We are so different from other industries; we are definitely in a good spot.
We can work from home when we need to. With only a computer and Internet access, we can work from the office, from home or even on vacation if we want to (one of my co-workers took a two-week vacation and is working part of the time to save on PTO). It’s so flexible!
We work with great people! Most SEO people either know or want to know other SEO people. We talk about more than just our industry and take an active interest in other people’s views and ideas.