Greetings from inside the SEOigloo!
Well, it’s another tepid evening in N. California, and I’m feeling driven to write this post because in the course of a day’s work, I have again come across the use of the word ‘grow’ on at least 4 different websites in a way that really gets to me. Here are some examples:
We will grow your business
You can grow your sales
Grow your revenue
We will grow your website
The use of the word grow in these phrases just bothers me. It just does! Grow vegetables, grow hair, grow up, and that’s fine, but this repeated talk about growing aspects of your business is becoming redundant. I’d rather hear a web developer or SEO say,
“We’ll build you a big, huge website and get you big, fat sales.”
It’s not elegant, but it’s less wormy, less latest buzzword-sounding. ‘Linkbait’ I can handle, though it makes me see a grub on a hook every time I hear it, causing me to say, ‘blech!”. ‘Web 2.0’ has kind of a nice ring to it, although no one seems to agree about exactly what it means. But growing a website just calls up images in my mind of a monotonous company meeting where the employees were all instructed to use this great phrase to pitch a sale. It doesn’t convey anything to me about working like heck to achieve a goal. I guess I’m saying, it sounds phony.
Produce, develop, expand, increase, or cultivate are nice alternatives that my word processor’s thesaurus is suggesting, and it’s just a software program. Surely, as human beings, we can come up with words to describe what we’re doing that speak to the heart with more gusto.
Now, I want to end this on a positive note, having vented my feelings. I was just taking a gander at an SEO Roundtable post and noticed the use of the word merit as a synonym for organic as a description for links. I’ve liked ‘organic’ since it first appeared on the language horizon in relationship to SEO, but I have to say, ‘merit links’ sounds sweet to my sensitive ears. It has a robust, rich tone. The pursuit of merit links strikes me as a worthy one. It makes our job sound rather grand! Don’t you agree?
