There is this one moment after you have written the last line of code, optimized the last stylesheet, and finally uploaded the website to the server. You lean back, sip your coffee, and feel that childlike urge to type your own name into Google. Not because you don't know who you are, but because you are looking for validation. In my case, the result was sobering. Nico Hartmann is not a rare name. There are Nico Hartmanns who play football, Nico Hartmanns who are active in local politics, and probably hundreds of Nico Hartmanns who simply exist without bothering the internet with their presence. But there I stood, somewhere on page five or six, buried under an avalanche of namesakes. In that moment it became clear to me that I had not just built a website, but a digital monument standing in the deepest forest where nobody sees it. The need to climb up the rankings was suddenly no longer just a logical next step, but a matter of honour.
SEO is the magic word that gets hammered into you in every marketing blog. Search Engine Optimization. It sounds like an exact science, almost like alchemy, but in reality it is the only measure with which I can manipulate Google and the like. You try to outsmart a system that is smarter than yourself by feeding it exactly what it wants to hear. So I started equipping every single subpage with correct titles and descriptions. Every meta tag was polished, every headline was reconsidered three times. You feel a little like a fraudster trying to sneak into an exclusive party. The goal is clear: the search engines must like it. It is no longer about what the human reader thinks, but about what the algorithm spits out in its dark data centres.
