SEO is Dead?

1 - I can do better 2 - Jury's out 3 - Pretty darn good 4 - Splendiferous 5 - Awesometastic by 14 people | Log in to rate

Ranked #4,124 in SEO, #193,270 overall

I believe SEO is dead - or at least is dying.
 
I'm not the first to say that, but my reasons are different. I'm also referring to SEO in a very wide sense, including strategies of link building and SMM.
 
The future? I can envisage something, but it's going to require very different approaches to those which most 'SEO experts' presently employ. Read on to find out why I believe SEO is dead, and take part in the discussion yourself.


Photograph by P G Champion under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 England & Wales (UK) Licence.

Before you start ... 

Before you read what I have to say, please say whether you believe SEO is effectively dead. There's another poll after the main text so that we can all compare whether my words have changed minds.

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SEO killed by Web 2.0? 

The view growing in the SEO community is that traditional SEO is being killed off by Web 2.0 and the growth of online social media. As search engines give increased rank to popular sites, the importance of profile within communities like Digg, Facebook and on YouTube is growing. Search engines aren't there to identify authority sites as many believe. Their priority isn't to identify sites with the best content. A site might be well organised - optimised for SEO - and heavily linked by commentators, but still not the site people want to see. Popularity is key. Search engines thrive by delivering the sites most people want to see. Feedback from click-throughs on search results and the Yahoo/Google toolbars are more likely to influence results than authority or backlinks. We've already seen the decline of on-site meta tags, of Google page rank. The theory goes that backlink strategies will be the next has been.

Image by Cibervolunteer under a GNU Free Documentation Licence, version 1.2

Social Media Marketing 

The response has been a shift from SEO (search engine optimisation) towards SMM (social media marketing). There's increased emphasis on getting votes on sites like Digg, on getting retweets on Twitter and dozens of other techniques.

In the short term, they work. They are something anybody wishing to promote web sites (including Squidoo lenses) needs to understand and exploit - try one of the books listed below. But the golden moment is now 2009 - and maybe early 2010. The signal to noise ratio on email has already grown to the extent that it's no longer a strong marketing tool. The same is happening now with Twitter and the other social media sites. There is a huge amount of spam, and even more content that is of little or no value. The rate at which techniques become obsolete is accelerating ... but I still don't believe that is the biggest threat to both SEO and SMM. I'll talk about that in the next section.

Facebook bought FriendFeed for it's real-time search technology. There's is a minority view that believes traditional standalone search engines will be replaced by searching from within social media sites, which will make SMM even more important.
 
Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day
Social Media Marketing: A...
The Social Media Marketing Book
The Social Media Marketin...
Secrets of Social Media Marketing: How to Use Online Conversations and Customer Communities to Turbo-Charge Your Business!
Secrets of Social Media M...
Social Media Marketing For Dummies
Social Media Marketing Fo...
Marketing 2.0: Bridging the Gap between Seller and Buyer through Social Media Marketing
Marketing 2.0: Bridging t...

Both SEO and SMM are dead 

The reasons why most SEO and SMM experts think SEO is dead, and SMM doomed, are somewhat self-indulgent. At the most basic, they are saying that a technique only gives and advantage when a few are exploiting it: once many people are using a technique, it ceases to be a differentiator. So link building is dead because it no longer is a stand-out advantage - your competitors are doing the same thing. It's running to stand still. Worse, search engines are wise to the practice and are adjusting their algorithms to prevent it from affecting rankings to a significant degree.

But that still overlooks the biggest issue which is saturation. The image by the Internet Mapping Project, Bell Labs/Lumeta Corporation, shows the Internet on January 16th 2009. Scientist have calculated that the Internet's growth obeys Moore's law and will double ever 5.32 years. Personally I think that understates the likely impact of tools like Twitter - to be fair the statistic is based in 'autonomous systems' and not pages - and that the rate of growth of the Internet is accelerating. I the past it may have doubled every 5.32 years, but I suspect that could now be down to every 3 or 4 years and getting quicker all the time.

We've seen in on Squidoo. It's gone from 100k lenses to 1m lenses. Getting noticed is much harder. And it's that saturation that is the issue for both SEO and SMM. If a search term delivers 10,000 matches, getting to the top is relatively easy. If it delivers 100,000 matches, being in the top 10 - the magic first page of search engines - means being the best out of every 10,000 pages. Once that reaches 1m matches, being in the top ten translates to being the best out of every 100,000 lenses. And it's getting steadily worse.

Every time the Internet doubles in size, the effort required to get onto the first page doubles - or worse because the opportunities to influence search engines is reducing all the time for the reason we have seen.

Already some search terms are beyond the reach of individuals acting alone to influence. Individual Internet marketeers will be shunted into narrower and narrower niches were they stand some chance of getting noticed. But even for corporarations, major search terms are beyong their ability to influence. Other than the brand leaders, a company selling cameras is as unlikely to be able to influence the results of the search term "digital cameras". Corporatons too will find that the weight of the web is increasingly beyond their ability to influence directly. The Web will become "purer" as a result - but little consolation to those trying to make money on the Web.

So just as SEO is dead, I believe SMM is dead to - because the Web is getting too big and complex to influence to a material

SEO and SMM are Dead ...

... and the assassin is saturation.

So what do you think now? 

Having read the thinking of others, and my own thoughts, what do you now think about the future of SEO and SMM?

Loading poll. Please Wait...

Your Reasons  

The poll is useful because it gives a snapshot of opinion, but the reasons behind peoples' votes is even more interesting. So please have your say below.

Are SEO and SMM dead?

Loading Fetching blurbs now... please stand by

Yes - here's why ...

Kylyssa says:

I hope SEO is dying, oh, I really do. Maybe it will mean the return of good writing and the death of keyword stuffing and other SEO nonsense! If people are free to work on their writing rather than focusing on tricks and techniques I think that they will write better.

SMM can go, too, as far as I'm concerned. I never was a popular kid and I suck at popularity games as an adult, too. It has been my dream that someday my writing would be judged on its quality and appeal rather than on my ability to shmooze.

Posted August 27, 2009

No - because ...

MiaBellezza says:

My ventures into SMM social media marketing were short and sweet. I quickly identified a waste of my valuable time with little results.

As far as SEO goes, I decide on the topic I'm going to write about, ascertain the best keywords to target and put the first few keywords, say 5 to 7, in the tags and then build my lens. Once done I refine the lens and ensure that I have my keywords in there, along with good keyword relevancy and density.

I continue to add modules to the lens to build upon it and check the keywords that are pulling the best. In a word, research, analyze and hone your skills in writing a compelling lens and ensuring it also has good SEO.

It works well for me!

Posted August 30, 2009

 

Defensive SEO and Stickiness 

If SEO is dead, hanging on to traffic will become increasingly important. I expect much more talk of sticky traffic. Super novae like Susan Boyle will always generate huge traffic spikes, but the fall-off will be almost as sharp as the leading edge. In business, management talk of "annuity income" - committed or regular customers who are likely to spend not just this year, but next year and the year after that. The priority in web traffic will be to keep existing visitors. It's one of the many reasons why I write about Defensive SEO.
featured lens Defensive SEO for Lenses

"This is what defensive SEO is all about. Not only are you doing things to make sure your pages rank higher than all other pages, but you are smart enough to know that you're not the only person trying to do the same exact thing." - YOUmozBlog This...

Crowd Powered Web 

One trend that is worth understanding is the crowd-powered web. Here's what I wrote about it.
featured lens Crowd Powered Web 2.0

I love the crowd powered Web. I think it's the greatest part of Web 2,0. Here are some examples of why I believe this is an important development socially, internationally and technologically. Crowd power is important in news reporting, monitoring t...

The Future? 

My thougts on the future belong in another lens but I've given some hints in the two lenses above. Suffice to say here that I'd suggest reading books on these two topics ...

 

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  • Reply
    JenOfChicago JenOfChicago Nov 25, 2009 @ 10:45 am
    You raise some really interesting questions in mind mind here, and I think you're on to something. I wonder what the "next big thing" will be.
  • Reply
    theraggededge theraggededge Nov 17, 2009 @ 3:02 pm
    Very interesting. I am new at all this and the information keeps shifting and changing all the time. Off to read Defensive SEO now.
  • Reply
    drifter0658 drifter0658 Nov 12, 2009 @ 7:51 am
    Excellent topic, although I disagree. SEO will always bey tantamount to any marketing campaign. SEO is evolving, but far from dead.

    I hope my comments in the duel "stick" because I'd hate to lay out the argument twice, either way.......

    Smell the smoke of a burn-out blessing?
  • Reply
    aj2008 aj2008 Nov 11, 2009 @ 4:27 am
    Yes, I DO like this lens because when you pose a question, your research and knowledge to support your case is always very thorough.

    My first instinct was to vote No for the question is SEO dead. And I did. But as I read through the lens, I realsised that what you are saying is also being said by others whose knowledge I respect.

    This is an excellent lens and has been Blessed. The lens deserves more traffic than it is getting - let's see what we can do about that ;)
  • Reply
    ChapelHillFiddler ChapelHillFiddler Sep 15, 2009 @ 6:04 am
    You make it sound totally hopeless. Now I'm depressed. In my field - wedding music - a couple years ago the top spots got swamped by "directory sites" that promised local music but actually delivered, for instance, bands in Milwaukee that had paid to be included and promised they would travel all over the country - for thousands of dollars, of course. My actual local band disappeared off the charts. I've been working at getting us back in the running but I believe mega-industrial-national sites have succeeded in building a wall between local vendors and local customers in this ultra-competitive field of weddings.
  • Reply
    prosperity66 prosperity66 Aug 28, 2009 @ 2:56 am
    I personally don't think SEO is dead - which doesn't mean I'm right, lol - at least, it's not entirely dead ; as you stated above, SMM works on the short term - and only in the short term and that's what entices me to say no, SEO isn't dead. Actually, I still believe that a site that is SE optimized along with good content published to article directories is the best way to having your site/blog/lens more and more popular; which is only possible on the long term.
    But I appreciated this lens as you put the facts as they are and hit some very interesting points.
    I'm rating and favoriting in case you would add more information to the lens.
    Dom.
  • Reply
    AddaptAbilities AddaptAbilities Aug 28, 2009 @ 2:53 am
    I'm still really new at this so I can't quite wrap my head around this lens, but I will keep trying.
  • Reply
    davidstillwagon davidstillwagon Aug 27, 2009 @ 9:21 pm
    Kate,
    you make a convincing argument about the fate of seo and smm. I don't know if that is good or bad but the lens was very though provoking. 5*
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Finally, thank you to the developers whose icons I feature on my Squidoo lenses: Please refer to "Icons I Love" for full details and links to the developers' own sites. I also appreciate the section dividers collected by Stargazer00.
featured lens Icons I Love

I user icons from a number of designers on many of my lenses. I've had a short dedication at the bottom of most lenses but decided it was about time I created a lens where I can talk more about my choices and over time extend the repertoire. There is...

by Kate-Phizackerley

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