Educational Toys for SEO Kids

Yesterday, my wife and I were out shopping for Christmas presents for our nephews and nieces. We went into Toys-R-Us in order to see what we could find. Looking at all the rows and rows of toys available for kids, a couple thoughts came to me:

Every parent has an innate fear that their kid is going to be anything less than the intellectual elite for their age group. No parent wants that - it reflects poorly on them! (Yes, I know, slightly cynical…)

Toy makers know this, and to that end have done everything in their power to create a marketable ‘educational aspect’ to every toy they make.

  • ‘Baby’s First Mobile - teaches shapes, colours, counting, arithmetic and discrete mathematics. Ages 6-24 months’

Ok, the example above is somewhat exaggerated. But I am sure you understand the kind of marketing I am referring to. They are marketing to parents who want to justify to themselves that they are intellectually stimulating their children and providing for their intellectual development when then leave them in a corner somewhere because they are too busy with their own lives to care for their children before they are old enough for daycare.

At any rate, ranting and cynicism aside, many SEOs have children. So what type of toys would be appropriate to develop the skills necessary for SEO work in their children from a young age?

  • Link it! - a fun game where players must link together a network of websites. Watch out for those spamlinks! Ages 3-6
  • Baby’s First Adsense Heatmap - train your child to instinctively determine the best ad placement. 0-18 months
  • Keywords! - Develop long tail keywords. The player with the longest list wins! 6-12 years
  • Plush Silky Matt Cutts Doll - Give your child someone to take comfort in and suck on when everything is bad.
  • Mechanical Spider & Web - Hang on your wall! Watch the thread color change as the Spider assigns trust! 3-6 years
  • Google Dance Party for the Xbox 360 - Teach your child the unpredictable steps of the Google Dance!

Ok, those were poor - what can you come up with?

3 Comments so far

  1. TechLH @ December 22nd, 2006

    It’s interesting that there’s probably a whole bunch of SSO (Store Shelf Optimization) people out there. I wonder if they have their own version of Matt Cutts…?

    How about the matching game - Find duplicate content and assign penalties to other players.

  2. AdMan @ December 23rd, 2006

    Nice TechLH,

    Bricks and mortar is filled with “duplicate content” . There seems to be a glut in consumer items and many retailers fighting for visitors to their stores. Bricks and mortar spam :)

    There are only so many ways you can sell hammers and nails, barbies and dresses.

    The real creativity comes in the advertising and marketing.

  3. tobto @ December 25th, 2006

    thats funny! ‘Develop long tail keywords’ - kittie, car, candy,…

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