What are your strategies for SEO?
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Search Engine Optimization strategies…sure, I’m here for it.
I think about this topic a lot actually, not usually in terms of SEO or Internet marketing, but rather how do we find exactly what we are looking for, or how does it find us in the embodied present?
The answers are mostly shrouded in a sea of Great Mystery, but there are special moments that arise at the intersection of deep listening and a yearning for clear vision. To illustrate (or further confuse), I have only a true story of last week’s quest for clean windows and the search for the roving window man…
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“What happened here?” she asks, squinting at the brown stains on the ceiling of the car he has only been driving for a couple months.
“Coffee,” says he.
How?! She wonders as she eyes the hazy brown film also splattering the windshield, “It needs to be cleaned before we go out of town.”
“I’ll clean it,” says he.
He didn’t. She didn’t. They leave on their roadtrip.
“How can you see through that?” She asks.
“I’ll clean it when we stop for gas,” says he.
He didn’t. She didn’t. They continue on the journey.
“It’s hard enough for me to see at night through a clean windshield; nearly impossible through one this filthy,” she says.
“I’ll clean it when we get to the hotel,” says he.
He didn’t. She didn’t.
Early the next morning she is still thinking about the dirty windshield as she unspools paper towels from the hotel room and stuffs them in her purse.
When he sees the nest of paper towels she has made in her purse he says, “What the–Why do you have all that?!”
“Windows!” She intones shrilly, sounding a bit like a winged dinosaur, “Clean windows?!?”
“I’ll clean them,” says he.
He didn’t. She didn’t.
They get in the car with the dirty windows and drive to downtown Huntsville, Alabama and park.
She stands in the street taking this picture in the early morning light…
…when she hears an unfamiliar voice behind her, “Excuse me, ma’am? I am cleaning windows.”
She turns to see an elderly man approaching. Rags and bottles of window cleaner hang on his walker.
She’s on foot and the car with the offending windows is five blocks away and this roving window man is moving so slowly. She blinks once….twice..
“…I don’t have windows…” she says stupidly.
“Ok,” he says as he ambles slowly on, “God bless you, God bless you.”
She observes the direction the roving window man is headed and when he’s out of ear-shot she hisses, “Hey! Did you hear that?! He is cleaning windows! We have to go back to the car–Now!!”
So the couple quickly walk the five blocks back to the car with the dirty windshield to find a parking ticket under the windshield wiper. (Because who can see through that mess to read parking signs? No one. The answer is no one.)
The search is on. They drive back to the street where the roving window man approached. He is not there. For half an hour they drive in ever-widening concentric circles around the place he was last seen. Window man has seemingly vanished. For half an hour they drive and then she spots this sign…
“Stop! Stop the car! Let me out. I’m going in this store and you are going to go find the window man on your own!” She says.
He complies.
Twenty minutes later he returns to pick her up with clean windows – inside and out – having found the window man in the area where the parking ticket had been received.
