By now, you will have read or heard the news on the Internet: ‘SEO is dead’… the whole fad has made some people freak out a bit, particularly those who are not into SEO but directly touched by it: clients, friends who work in sales, affiliates, work colleagues: they have been asking me if they should stop writing good content and worrying about getting more links and concentrate on doing more social media.
They have heard that social media seems to be the new SEO. So SEO appears to be dying and social media seems to be taking over and therefore social media marketing is taking over search engine optimisation (seo)….
I have been hearing his ‘SEO is dead’ fad ever since before last summer. The rumour spreaded out quite quickly in the organisation where I work as someone sent out a link to the website that tells about the book you see on the left. The same day I had more than 10 colleagues asking me what I thought about it, whether SEO was really out of the game. My answer was no at the time, and it still is today. So I have written this post to send the link to those who ask me in future.
For as long as at least one of the three points below are true, there will always be SEO, in my opinion:
- Search engines are like disabled users in many ways
- websites exist and need to be promoted
- relevancy and importance are two key ranking factors in the search engine algorithms
SEO and social media are perfectly compatible and they work best when they are working together. SEO is still young, but social media is younger, therefore if I had to choose I would likely alway give priority to investing in SEO. Of course every business is different and there may be times when the nature of the business dictates a social media inclination.
I am listing a few blog posts here to provide some background into the ‘SEO is dead’ story, so that you can then make your own conclusions:
Eric Enge from Stone Temple Consulting and also co-author of one of the best SEO books written recently: The Art of SEO
posted an article on SEW a few weeks ago titled: Is SEO Dying? How will it Evolve?. Eric kicks off his post by saying that many people don’t understand what SEO really is. He also explains why social cannot be taken as a unique way of determining importance (social votes) at least for now, and he uses the Twitter example: ‘what’s best a tweet or an authoritative link?‘
Recently Peter Davanzo made the following comment on a post he wrote for the SEOBook blog:
“People have been predicting the death of SEO since, well, the beginning of SEO”