Is SEO Dead?
Thursday, 18 December 2008 09:37
After reading an article on Biznik by Gabriella Sannino in response to an article by Eoghan McCabe, I have to jump back in with my 2 cents.
I have been thinking about the current state of SEO and it's future quite a bit. In fact, I thought about titling my article, Forget Everything You Think You Know About SEO, as SEO Is Dead.
McCabe received a lot of flak for his views about SEO. McCabe basically states that good SEO is a actually a bunch of best practices when building a website, and that anything more than this (keyword laden articles, sponsored links, manipulated anchor text) is bad SEO and responsible for the demise of The Web. Seems natural for McCabe to receive flak over this as he's basically saying SEO consultants are a bunch of spammers.
I not sure there's a black and white answer to the question 'is SEO bad'. Besides dismissing SEO completely, there isn't an individual point in the McCabe article that I don't agree with.
SEO has evolved over the years from stuffing a whole bunch of keywords into your meta tags (which was standard practice for a while), to repeating keywords over and over again in web content (again standard practice for a while), to using descriptive (and manipulative) anchor text (standard practice now).
Good SEO is writing a quality article like McCabe's, with a provocative title, that gets linked to because it provides something useful. Not because the link was paid for or traded.
Let's be real though. Most business owner's motivation stems from increasing the bottom line, not the betterment of The Web for all. To rank well for competitive keywords, it is necessary to do on page optimization as well as link building and other off-page techniques.
Let's look at some of the points being made by both sides:
Is it spam to write and submit articles to article directories to improve ranking?
Here's the deal, it's not a good thing to post the same article to your website and a bunch of article directories. Google sees this as duplicate content, and will penalize you for it. This means you will probably save the best stuff for your own website. The articles you submit to other websites will target some specific keywords and include links back to your site. It's spam if the article does not provide useful information. Providing high-quality articles for you own site is time consuming enough, doing it for another site is even more difficult. If it's not high-quality, it's spam.
Is on-page optimization a bunch of best practices?
Yup, it is. Structure your page properly and you're good.
Are SEO consultants evil?
Some of 'em are. The rest are hired to improve rankings for their clients and that's what they work to do. That's far from evil.
Is SEO dead?
Nope. For competitive keywords and phrases it's necessary to engage in both on and off-page SEO to rank well. I'm pretty sure SEO is not dying either, but it will continue to evolve. Google already looks at where on the page a link is, the context it is displayed in and the anchor text. Google is no longer counting the number of times a keyword is repeated to tell if an article is relevant, but is instead using latent semantic content analysis. Google will continue to update its algorithms, SEO consultants will continue to update their methods and businesses will continue to hire SEO consultants to remain competitive.
