Is SEO dead?
I was reading a thread at a big webmaster forum yesterday which made the claim that “SEO is dead.” Now, it’s hard to say whether or not the original poster was being serious or sarcastic, but he referenced some other news he’d been reading on a few authority sites that made the “dead” claim.
The notion was that, because of the prevalence of Web 2.0 community sites, the idea of needing to optimize for any of the engines was going away — and fast. The idea was also put forth by another poster that, because of the huge number of content management systems that are already setup to be “search engine friendly”, the need to have any additional knowledge to rank well was quickly diminishing.
My answer to all this? Poppycock.
First, while it is true that there are many CMS programs that are search engine friendly out of the box, on-page factors matter so little to ranking (at least in Google) that even if the on-page playing field was leveled, it would make little difference in the current search engine results.
Second, SEO is about far more than just what’s on the page. The way you analyze what keywords are worth optimizing for, the way you write the content around those keywords, and the links you get to the pages that you want to rank for those keywords all have a large role to play in how much traffic you get from the search engines — and that analysis takes specialized knowledge. Anyone can learn to do it, but it does have to be learned.
Third, and most importantly, Web 2.0 is nice, and sites that revolve around that kind of community are huge traffic mongers (e.g. YouTube), but there will always be a need for full-text indexing of the web.
So is SEO dead? Nope. It’s alive and well, and will be for as long as people need to search for information on the web.
