SEO is Dead – Long live SEO

It’s interesting what the words SEO is dead can do. Such a simple statement causes armies to rise up on both sides ready to do verbal battle on their blogs and forums. But is SEO really dead? A simple search for this phrase turns up close to 8 million results. I think that alone answers the question.

While I can’t agree more with VP of Business Development for Lijit Networks and CEO and Co-Founder for Graphic.ly Micah Baldwin’s statement that SEO is something that needs to be done in-house as a shared responsibility, not outsourced to the consultants who sell snake oil promises of top three rankings in Google; practicality tells me that optimization is not something that can be ignored. Especially in today’s online landscape.

8 Million Results

Eight million results returned for the phrase “SEO is dead” shows us that the web is over-saturated at this point. Your site may have the most well-written content, a great collection of images, and plenty of useful links but if you are ranking anywhere below the top ten, there’s a good chance that nobody is going to ever see it.

In order to get our content in front of our targeted audience, something has to be done to give it the page ranking it deserves. For a while, tricking the search engines through black hat techniques was the way many SEO experts were able to accomplish this. Of course, once the engineers who build the search engines started to look into ways to prevent these tactics, “traditional” SEO started losing ground to more honest optimization techniques.

Social Media

Some in the camp that advocates SEO has been buried, point out that social media is one of the conspirators who dealt one of the deadly blows. Baldwin gives a great example of this in his blog, Learn to Duck by stating, “The content generated by users of social media began to rank highly in search engines, because it was RELEVANT. Because it had VALUE. Because it was TIMELY. Because it was REAL.”

People want to hear what others have to say much more than they want to read a relevant keyword over and over again in the first 100 words. Add to the mix the fact that social media fuels the viral fire and you have a formula for success.

Technical SEO

A particular movement in SEO has been to drop the keyword stuffing and the irrelevant content and move towards Semantic HTML.  Semantic HTML moves the developer towards a set of standards in the design of the website to make it easier for spiders to crawl the site and find the relevant content. Adding alt tags to images, using proper tags and page structure, and getting rid of tables not only makes the site easier to crawl, but makes it helps the site comply with the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative that works towards making websites accessible to the disabled.

Is that really SEO?

Listen to some of the big names in SEO and they will cringe at the thought that SEO is limited to tricks like keyword stuffing and meta tags. They may be 100 percent correct, but do a search for SEO techniques and see what you get in return. Out of the 17,500,000 sites, how many of them actually go through the true SEO techniques that the few true professionals advocate? Most of what you will get is a self-proclaimed “expert” selling his latest e-book that instructs you to write relevant content dense with keywords in the first paragraph.

So answer the question

So is SEO dead? Not hardly. If we apply Moore’s Law to the web, we can see that the number of sites has approximately doubled every two years from 23,148 in 1996 to over 162 million in 2008. With that much competition for the coveted top ten results, developers face a rough road when optimizing their sites.

SEO is evolving as it adapts to technologies like Wiki engines, blogs, Facebook, and Flash. At the same time, it is coming full-circle by getting back to the roots of what the web really is. By throwing away all of the methods used to trick the search engines and is focusing on providing useful, human-friendly content, true SEO will be alive and kicking for Web x.0.