For die-hard sports fans, March is the month of nirvana. With it comes the biggest event in the sports world – the NCAA Men’s
Basketball Tournament.

This also means that offices all over the world lose productivity for a month as employees pore over their brackets, desperate to peg the sleeper team that will help their picks rise to the top.

Everyone has a different method for making picks. Some people spend hours looking over the statistics, finding something in the guard from a 13-seed school that is hard evidence for a Sweet 16 run. Other people choose based on their affinity for a mascot or between the colors of the schools facing off.

These are strategies that have worked for years. But it’s 2012, and it’s time to make a change.

Are you ready to create an expert NCAA bracket? Better yet, are you ready to ensure that your competition creates a repugnant bracket, therefore making you seem like the expert?

Duping your co-workers and family members is possible through some basic search engine optimization (SEO) practices. Let’s go through the steps:

Read more…

Ah yes, SEO’s and dating. This is a look and synopsis of the reactions our dates have when we explain our profession.

Why are you looking at me like I’m a garbage man?

We’ve all been there. It’s your first date out with that special someone and he or she asks you what you do for a living. The fun part comes after you describe your role as a Search Engine Optimization professional.

“We’re very important…we have many leather bound books”

SEO’s know how important our industry is, how much our efforts can help our clients and how the industry has been growing over the last few years.

It’s also fair to say that a career in SEO (or any kind of internet marketing) can be fairly lucrative. Our industry is growing and businesses are still realizing how SEO can help them. Experienced SEO’s are in high demand and new roles continue to appear at agencies, corporations, and other organizations.

We are catches, right?

Because our industry is fairly new, it’s safe to assume that our special someone has no idea about what we do. With telling our dates what we do, there are a variety of reactions that come. Explaining what we do can bring about a cornucopia of reactions from those who are not in the know. Our Sixth City Marketing team exchanged stories at a recent happy hour about these reactions. With that we present to you:

Common reactions when telling a date we do SEO

1. Deer in the headlights

You’ve lost them already. This commonly happens after saying your title and a sentence or two into the description of what you do. If things have gone well to this point, change the subject and backtrack to it on future dates.

2. Baffled

Like Ben Stein in Ferris Buehler’s Day Off, you’ve lost the class. This is the more visible look. They’re perplexed. If her next question is “You do this full time?”, then it’s time to tell her you live with your parents. Like a tall shot of Robitussin, this line instantly gets them tired and ready to go home.

3. The gold digger

Overly interested. She may not know what you do but she assumes you’re making bank. Proceed with caution there, big cat.

4. Too good to be true

She knows exactly what you do and even finishes the sentence for you. This one event can transcend your date into something that could be a short story written by Nicholas Sparks. We’ve found that this most likely occurs by meeting people though www.farmersonly.com.

5. The stalker

Her normal look changes into a determined and twisted stare and she exclaims “Oh I already know…I know everything.”  This may or may not be followed by a twitch. Our collective advice: find a distant relative in another part of the country and lay low. A bonus to this is that our profession should allow you to work remotely. This is a lead-in to our next blog post – SEO’s and Stalkers: Remote Areas With Great Wireless Connections. If you feel yourself wanting to be with her, be sure to watch Fatal Attraction first.

What have your experiences been? What did we miss?  We haven’t forgotten the female perspective either, which we are saving for a future blog post.