And Miles To Go Before I Sleep

I have embarked on a new journey; I am off to discover new lands through uncharted waters. My latest expedition requires me to take on new roles in a very challenging but equally rewarding environment. My only hope is that my destination awaits me at the end of this voyage, and not another passage towards my purpose of being.

It has happened before, and I am afraid it will happen again. You know history has this god forsaken habit of repeating itself. Every time I felt I was near my goal, I found myself to be ages away. Every time I got the celebrations going, I ended up mourning myself, and my efforts. The path I have chosen to walk on unfortunately has no foot prints to help me on my way. I am alone, sometimes lost and at times right on target. The twists and turns are occasionally baffling, and sporadically justified.

I have built all the suspense and managed to stir some emotions in your, the reader’s mind, only to inform that I have left my previous company and have successfully migrated to another one. Damn those were some big words that I formally wrote and hence now I have to do something equally crazy and casual to satisfy my prehistoric, Neanderthal brain before it goes KABOOM!

My tiny brain is not equipped to handle serious situations or serious emotions. It is a collection of jokes, useless rants and musings, non sense making ideas and creativity that sucks and blows at the same time. For me creativity is not thinking out of the box, I refuse to acknowledge the existence of any such box, and I deny my involvement in its creation. I have never quite understood the concept of having a box and then thinking out of it. If you originally wanted to think out of the box than why did you choose to own it in the first place? It makes you look dumb and the box dumber, and people will undoubtedly doubt your creativity based on the choice of you having a box, and then opting to not use it to its fullest potential before blaming it for not being creative and stepping out of its boundaries.

In my thirty one years of existence I have observed children to be the most creative of all creations. Just yesterday I found my youngest daughter of 1 and a half year, in the bathroom lying on the tiles, enjoying the sensations coming from the wet floor during this cold season. For her, this was the height of creativity, since this was the first time she was doing something like this, and I as her father joined her to experience the joy she was enjoying and participate in the celebrations. My wife on the other hand wasn’t so thrilled by seeing all this and deemed us both as being crazy, typically in the same fashion as the world labels creative people as gone cases.

Fortunately for me my new job allows me the freedom to be creative, well not lying on the bathroom floor creative, but it does allow me to spread my wings and fall flat on my ass. Hopefully this time, this job manages to fuels my creative passions and channels my creative energies for a positive outcome.

SEO

For most people SEO is a short form of SEOUL or SEOUL spelled wrong, and that is the exact scenario in Pakistan. People who only have basic knowledge or no practical knowledge what so ever are branding themselves SEO Guru's and Pundit's, and the rest of the IT graduate herd are blindly following and happily  paying them for absolutely nothing. Well the so called, self proclaimed gurus, champions and pundits are making a fool of the students and that does require some effort on their part so i will retract my earlier sentence and rephrase it by saying the students are paying them to make a foll of themselves and a joke out of the SEO industry.

Never in the history of the I.T industry has more garbage ever amassed than the amount of trash which is being gathered and spread right now all in the name of teaching SEO. You see SEO is a very tricky business, and proper awareness is no where to be found. Basically SEO is all about content and the placement of content, keywords, titles etc. Since Google is armed and powered with all sorts of tools, you have to be a thorough professional and think things through while devising and implementing a SEO strategy for your website. Google can differentiate between good and bad, coped and original content. It knows grammar and has a vocabulary better than most of us. Now my question here is, if the content on your site is poorly written and poorly placed, how can you expect your website to rank high? When i see the self proclaimed SEO gurus and masters and read some supposedly insightful information written by them, more often that not there are grammatical, punctuation and spelling mistakes in it. Now since they are SEO gurus dont they know the value of content and the worth of a well written piece of text?

The web is littered with true and false information about SEO principles and techniques, but since SEO is more of an art and less of science, it requires creativity, quick wit, patience and writing good content skills. The aim to get a website high on rankings is a tough and time consuming job, it requires a lot of content, back links, a proper content placement strategy and constant observation or even spying on the competitors. Sadly our SEO gurus are too busy deceiving innocent young people and hence do not have the time to actually demonstrate all these elements through incorporating them into the curriculum that they offer to teach to the willing and sometimes plain old dumb students.I know it sounds harsh but the students are dumb since they do not bother to research and happily pay for something which they can easily learn right from the comfort of their own home, without paying anyone for anything.

But that does not mean everything in the SEO industry in Pakistan is bad, but because of these SEO jerks the competent SEO professionals have forced themselves to go into hiding since they do not want to be in the same spotlight with the self proclaimed champions, leaders and trendsetters of the SEO industry in Pakistan. So my advice for the SEO hopefuls would be to perform a complete research and background check first on the SEO principles and then on the SEO guru whom they wish to pay for nothing.