March 26th, 2010 by Nick

One thing you may notice as we explore more and more specialised SEO terms is the prevalence of what looks like casual slang- we’ve already discussed link condoms and astroturfing, for example. If you have a technical or research background, that looks a bit over-casual and a bit cheeky, but it is an interesting observation about search engine optimization as compared to more traditional analytical and technical fields and can tell us a lot.

The reason it is this way is that search engine optimisation is a very new development. Only 20 years ago it was in absolute infancy, restricted to the knowledge that having a lot of keywords in the page meta was good and that any link was a good link. For a little while it may really have been that simple, but as the internet grew and evolved into the incredibly complex and unimaginably huge network it is today, SEO evolved too. It is now as subtle as the algorithms search engines use, which pretty subtle much of the time. There are still a few basic tenets- have good quality content, pursue quality link building strategies, use social media marketing- but SEO is changing as fast as the internet is.

Very little SEO research goes on inside universities or dedicated research institutes. It’s grown up organically around commercial needs and desires. The most respected thinkers in SEO are those that do it. Their understanding is indisputable, because their techniques and ideas get results. So the terminology that SEO researchers invent is practical and every day, often spur of the moment or even metaphorical. The meanings are usually transparent to other SEO professionals (link love being a fine example). If a concept is useful, it’ll be used regardless of what it’s called.

The casual nature of the language reflects the SEO research environment. There are technical conferences as there are in other scientific and technical disciplines, but the bulk of SEO knowledge dissemination goes on in public or private forums on the internet, by email, or chat. It is primarily social in nature, even more so since the birth of social networking sites and other social media platforms.

It’s also interesting to compare the language used in computing now and, let’s say 30 years ago, before the internet became a major force in information distribution and such a resource for learning. The structure and terminology used by early programming languages like Fortran 77 was very formal and very fixed. Perl, which was developed with the internet firmly in mind and is one of the most prolific languages ever in terms of active forums, freely available open source code, commentary, and tutorials on the internet, uses casually named functions like ‘pop’ and ‘chomp’.

All this musing is very interesting (or we hope it is!), but what lessons can we learn here? The first is not to be fooled by the relaxed nature of SEO jargon. The concepts behind link juice and stickiness are no less powerful for being casually named.

The second is that the use social media marketing is changing the way we think about research and knowledge. We are beginning to blur the lines between the tools we use for fun and the tools we use for serious work. You can see it in the development of SEO and in computing, and as the social web becomes even more prevalent, it’s likely that we’ll see it spread to other sciences.  The changing nature of technical language is another sign of the great shift towards social media and social organisation.

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