My name is Derek Hobson, I’m a Sr. Director of SEO at Brainlabs. I’ve been doing SEO since 2012. Some things you should know:

I believe SEO can be learned in a day.

As a concept, most aspects of SEO are common sense. Do you like a slow site? No. Do you like reading content that’s shallow and meaningless and like it was written by someone who’s never seen the product before? Of course not. SEO is not hard. What is hard is figuring out where to start without aimlessly wandering around. An SEO knows where to look and what to focus on.

I believe English papers are the essence of any good SEO.

I had to read numerous out-of-time texts (Shakespeare, The Iliad) and sum up some 500 cryptic pages in 5-pages for a modern audience. My English background doesn’t make me a stickler for grammar; it does however allow me to read about addiction, iCloud security services, reverse mortgages, executive finance education classes and summarize them for a layperson to understand. 

There’s a big difference in search intent from a user looking up “get DUI off record” and “expunge my record” and I excel at identifying those audiences and writing content that caters to them.

I believe “best practices” are passive aggressive.

It’s not “me” you’re disagreeing with, I’m saying these are the “best practices” by the SEO whozits and whatsits.

Moreover, if you’ve worked on 1 ecom site and 1 saas site, you know they’re different. You also know that CMS-es are different. And you know the internal politics to get something launched are different. “Best practices” don’t exist. It’s lazy at best and passive aggressive at worst.

The internet should be fun!

The Googlers at Webmaster hangouts talk about this a lot and how many of the rules in place are to make the internet fun. This makes for a solid point below my atheism to best practices because — whether for SEO or UX — any “best practice” will have a counter-argument in place. One of my favorites being Paddy’s Life Below the Fold (unsecure — I know, right?! — but it is safe). This site came into my life at a time when getting copy above the fold was all any of my clients talked about.

Common sense should come first

Steve Krug authored Don’t Make Me Think in… hoo boy I don’t know when, but it is easily still one of the most relevant books for UX & design. I’ll give you the cliff’s notes:

People don’t read.

-Steve Krug (grossly paraphrased)

They look at sites like they’re billboards driving by at 60mph on the freeway, so sites should be designed that way.

Make things obvious; don’t make people think.