SEO addictions affect countless marketers and website-owners around the globe today. Recognize the man in the image above? You may be one of many suffering from a severe SEO obsession. Check out these ten tell-tale signs to determine if you are an SEO addict.

Indicators of An SEO Addiction

1. Upon hearing the words “Panda” and “Penguin”, you immediately think of aggressive, spam-fighting machines, not cuddly zoo animals.

For an SEO addict, our little black and white friends “Panda” and “Penguin” no longer resemble gorgeous creations of nature. Instead, SEOers picture Google’s mechanisms for penalizing sites with schemy SEO tactics through demoting or banishing sites that have implemented keyword stuffing, link-farming, and other black hat methods. Just wait until Google alters the reputation of another helpless black and white animal. Zebras beware.

2. You include link-building in your job description or skills, and you are not a blacksmith.

Are link-building and link-baiting your favorite hobbies? To an SEOer, these terms indicate targeting an audience in order to gain referrals and links, and building your page or domain authority. However, the rest of the world might wonder why you are building links…

3. (Behavioral Test) View this image then proceed…

If this meme just made you laugh… sign yourself up for SEOs anonymous. 

3. “Great content” is both your motto as well as your favorite “inside” joke.

Matt Cutts! Content is king. Any true SEOer loves the redundancy of the phrase, and the infinite jokes made regarding “great content“. But hey, it’s only funny because it’s true. Copywriters, I’m especially talking to you. If you live by the phrase “content is king“, congratulations you are an SEO addict. Extreme fanatics will be familiar with this:

4. You can summarize any topic in exactly 156 characters, on the dot, in one swift move.

Did someone say meta descriptions? Experiences SEOers have got this one down to a science after completing a few meta descriptions. Now if you can do this with your eyes closed and without counting, this definitely lands you in the category of an SEO junky.

5. You complete the joke “A man walks into a bar…” with “bars, pub, club, drinks, beer, wine, liquor, shots…”

SEO addicts can’t help but to rattle off a few keywords when a topic arises. Just make sure they don’t bring out the keyword planner! As part of an SEOs job, he/she must tailor content to specific keywords in order to optimize a website. It’s another story when the keywords start coming out offline!

7. Bootstrap is a verb. Earl (url) is not a name. Blackhats are not fashionable; they are detestable.

In the eyes of an SEO, Twitter isn’t just a social media platform. The company has also created Bootstrap- a group of set of javascript, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and images that allow website owners to manage and manipulate interfaces. As for Earl and his black hat… well, that’s just SEO jargon.

8. You need anger management to deal with the frustration upon hearing the following questions and comments:

• Can’t you just pay to get your site at the top of the search engine? What about buying links?
• But my competitor does [insert poor SEO tactic here].
• Sounds easy. I bet I could do that on my own. (coming from someone with no experience in the field)
• Why am I not ranked #1 yet?

The knowledge and patience of SEO aficionados are constantly tested by non-SEO’s. SEO addicts will often find it difficult to feel understood or fully appreciated by others. Many conversations attempting to explain SEO methods or situations will result in frustration and/or amusement.

9. You consider yourself multi-lingual for your knowledge of HTML and coding as well as SEO lingo.

H1, H2, Meta, Alt Tags, <b>, <i>, <u>,  rel=author, indexing, 404 redirects, anchor text, nofollow, and SERP are part of an SEO addict’s vocabulary. You will generally find SEOs discussing these terms and employing them, saying that’s “the baby stuff”. (Developers would agree). Upset that Facebook and Twitter don’t allow you to bold or italicize? Yeah, you’re addicted.

10. You love traffic.

While everyone else complains about traffic, in your opinion, there’s nothing you enjoy more… on your site, that is.

Are You Addicted to SEO?

Fortunately, there is a place for SEO addicts to cope with their obsessions: the internet. This haven for SEOers provides a beneficial symbiotic relationship for the two through a development of user-friendly, relevant websites. Enjoy this article or know of any other symptoms of an SEO addiction? Feel free to share by commenting below!