Search Engine Optimization is Dead

I bet that got your attention. I hear that comment from a lot of people. They tell me that search engine optimization doesn’t work anymore, search engine marketing is the new “SEO”, it’s all about social marketing now, and PPC is a better use of a company’s money than SEO.

Like all black and white thinking, there’s some truth in all of these statements but they all “throw out the baby with the bath water”. It’s foolish to rely on just one form of marketing. And yet a lot of businesses do exactly that. A better approach is a multi-faceted marketing plan that utilizes two or three of these online methods.

And search engine optimization is the perfect backbone or adjunct to any of these other forms of online marketing. Search engine optimization does work. It isn’t just about utilizing the right keywords or making certain that all the HTML is clean or eliminating dead links or regularly creating appropriate content or even using the right URLs. SEO requires a wholistic approach to web design, maintenance, and strategy.

However, I’d like to address the people who say keywords are dead or are a waste of time in search engine optimization, especially with Google. To them I say two things:

1) Any way you want to slice it, Google and all the other search engines really only have one criteria they can use to determine if a website deserves the attention of their clients: words. Yes, they look at incoming links for votes of confidence because, to a certain extent, it is a popularity contest. But in the final analysis of whether a site gives their searchers what they are looking for, it still comes down to the words in the title, description, and the page copy. If this weren’t true, no amount of tweaking of meta tags and copy would affect placement. And my successful work with client’s websites contradicts that.

2) Adwords. Adwords is probably one of the best analysis tools out there to figure out what your keywords should be. Adwords ads are short, tasty and to the point (at least the good ones are). Even the change of a single word can have a huge effect on results. That same power can be used to create an incremental effect on your website placement. Because SEO is about incremental improvements, not a “big bang”.

Lastly, if you analyze the copy of the top placing websites for your client’s keyword phrases, it gets pretty obvious pretty quick, that there really is a relationship between copy, keywords, and search engine placement. And the competitive analysis and resulting recommendations are what my clients are paying for.

Search engine optimization is not dead. Nor is it the “be all, end all” of online marketing. It is just a potent tool that should be the springboard for all other online marketing approaches.

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This entry was posted by Bob McClain on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Interactive Marketing, Natural Search.
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