SEO professionals (such as The Emperor) practice their craft to help organizations establish a findable online presence. The ‘optimization’ does a bit (ok, significant amount) of dumbing down the grade level of what’s written. One could easily argue that is a good thing, since such a small percentage of the adult (or overall) population can’t read very well anyway. The typical newspaper (not talking WSJ or NY Times here) is written in fairly easy-to-digest prose, so it’s fair to say that SEO activities are a reflection of society.

To see your level of lexical elitism, play this fun SEO game: run a search and see what separates the top-ranked listing from those further down the page (or next page). We did so with plumber and fed the first page of copy through a ‘smarty-pants-readability’ tool.

Our findings below. Proof positive that good SEO=lower grade level. So ends Umibot’s argument against the SEOism of life as we know it.

Here begins Umibot’s argument for SEO-friendly standards in business cards. It’s a fairly visual argument, represented by Exhibit A and Exhibit B. Let’s just say they are not card scanner friendly.

Exhibit A

Exhibit B