SEO Is Not Dead

Posted on December 7, 2007
Filed Under Promotion |

I just stumbled across this operator, from the great town of Warrington, in the metroplex of Manchester, England. I like his thinking about SEO and I have to agree completely with his article.

SEO never went away. The SEO people expanded into SEM when AdWords became a more viable way to get traffic, and into SMO as the Web 2.0 tools started doing most of the heavy lifting.

But no one gave up existing skills and experience, and no one threw away any advantage that could be had, if it was worth more than the time and labor it took to produce it.

I remember an old hand saying in Threadwatch once that he hadn’t bothered with a meta tag for the last year or so, and everyone was in the same position pretty much. But I remember also within a couple of years later we were seeing value in the tags again. Optimizing a site on simple and non-aggressive SEO principles is still the basic preliminary that I do for any new build that I’m involved with. But there’s so much more than this to be done to bring advantage to the client.

Lee McCoy is right in his observation:

The most interesting of features that I don’t think the majority of search engineers have picked up on is that PR and SEO has almost merged into an amorphous entity. Brand reputation management now goes hand-in-hand with SEO. But you need the SEO skills built up over a number of years to truly fulfill your client’s needs when it comes to SMO. - SEO is Not Dead - Its Been Evolving For Years

There should be a new word for what gets done in the name of promotion. SEO was just one beginning part of the whole, and even in the beginning it vied with business acumen and natural guerrilla marketing for best ROI. These last two are still the most highly prized in my book. They have always seemed to me to form part of the fundamental SEO instinct, and this instinct can prevail in the absence of all tools I think.

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