I was struck with a good question the other day. It was asked during a conversation with friend who works as a freelancer for a number of non-tech publications. She was interested in SEO.

I started explaining that SEO can best be described as advanced common sense for webmasters. That seemed like as good a place to start as any at the time. Sounds logical enough eh? Making the mistake was as easy as falling off a log.

(Falling of logs, by the way, is almost always a very big mistake on Vancouver Island because we have lots of very big logs to fall from.)

I said the word webmaster. That definitive word dictated the direction my follow-up thoughts flowed in and created an unspoken hierarchy of knowledge. It was an accidental stop word in an otherwise interesting conversation.

Her placid expression turned to a pained one and she stopped me to tell me I had lost her a few sentences back, somewhere around the TITLE tag. I was only a few sentences in.

My friend the freelancer is pretty smart and I think she is a damn good writer. She is web-literate enough to use the Internet in several complicated ways. She can attach files to emails, download music from iTunes, and move through the SERPs results with the efficiency of a skilled researcher. Not only does she have Flickr and Linked-in accounts, she can even file story materials and images using a FTP client if necessary. In short, she is an average to above average Internet user.

“Oh dang,” I thought to myself, “this isn’t going to go as easily as planned.”

It took a moment to figure out the confusion. She was thinking the URL and title where the same thing. She wanted to ask a question but I was plowing forward into my “Titles, Tags, Text (content) and Links” mantra-speech, the same one I deliver variations on from time to time.

Before we could move onward towards the goal of explaining the simple complexities of SEO, she articulated her part of the misunderstanding in as gentle a way as she could asking, ““Why do you @*&$ing geeks talk like you’re *&#$heal lawyers?”

That was a surprising question, one I didn’t have a quick answer for. It did pose a number of other questions for me though. First and foremost, why would a well-worded highly intelligent writer who sometimes speaks like a sailor think geeks are prone to speaking like lawyers?

Perhaps it is because we, as geeks, sometimes speak in SIG-Latin, a language a kin to Rig-Latin. Rig-Latin is the specialized language spoken by oil-workers. Variations are found in other employment sectors. Excavators and miners, for instance, speak a form of dig-Latin. Try talking shop with a group of any of the professionals above and, more often than not, you’ll quickly be left in a wake of sectoral verbal short-hand. It happens, just as it does with Lawyers.

As a matter of fact, one of the only professions that doesn’t have a strict professional shorthand language is that of writers. It is the writer’s job to try to boil the complex into simple, plain language. While SEO can be expressed in as many simple analogies as one can come up with, a fairly complex base of knowledge is required to begin to understand those analogies. Sort of like knowing gas is a flammable vapor before understanding the workings of an internal combustion engine.

We never did complete our discussion about SEO. Instead we got lost in the interesting intricacies of other people’s languages. The conversation also served to remind me how easily it is to get frustrated while reading lawyerly language. It also left me hoping I don’t write in geek inspired SIG-Latin too often.