The New SEO is About Creativity
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Sometimes you need someone to tell you what you think. I write so much and often I’m tempted to write longer articles than necessary.
Content size seems to be a quality and ranking factor in recent years so that it gets hard to formulate simple truths in a few words.
One day I asked my followers on social media whether SEOs are selling out to Google and offering Google Adwords instead of optimization.
A few good answers have been provided by some well respected industry experts and some of my faithful followers who are not yet that prominent.
One comment came too late so that I wasn’t able to include it in the partly crowdsourced post I made for Raven but it was so good that I decided to feature it as an extra post here.
This outstanding comment summarizes pretty much the last 5 years of SEO evolution.
It’s rather a full-fledged analysis. It comes from Chris P. King – a versatile marketer, writer and traveler. I added some text decoration to make crucial statements stand out:
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I’m in agreement with Micah Fisher-Kirshner that SEO has become much more than just SEO.
This shift has always been occurring but has accelerated with the onset of a ‘content marketing’ which was a reaction to Penguin and Panda, and now another shift with Hummingbird.
I would imagine that most SEOs would have adapted along the way, however, a good % of them would have been lost.
Certainly, those SEOs who were always talking technical, Black Hat and link building would have the most to learn about the new ways to rank in search engines.
It’s obvious that SEO now favors more well rounded ‘marketers’ to succeed. IMHO it also favors more creativity as well (I know some people have disagreed with me in the past on creativity and still think that a more technical approach is more in favor).
The one great thing though is that [generally speaking] if you want to build something useful and valuable you’ll benefit from the new SEO.
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You could argue that black hat SEO to sneak in links on unsuspecting third party sites has been always about creativity.
It’s a different kind of creativity. In case you are not out there to trick people you have to embrace the convincing creativity of the new SEO.
Call it SEO 2.0 or whatever you like but don’t forget that SEO is not what it used to be 5 or 10 years ago.
It’s a creative discipline like graphic design or writing nowadays. In fact design and content are parts of it.
* Creative Commons image by Rob Walker.
You know, Tad, once upon a time I knew nothing of SEO. It was the 2004, I think. I had just turned 19. Website creation and blogging were still a hobby to me. Then in 2007 I found out about paid blogging networks and I became a blogger who used her personal sites to earn money through sponsored posts. Still, I didn’t know a thing about SEO, but my blogs were thriving on creativity and probably advertisers loved the way I could turn their given keywords into a fun story that involved either myself or fictional characters (because some blogs were role-play blogs).
Today I know what SEO was, is and is turning into. But I didn’t stop writing sponsored posts, especially on my fictional blogs. ;) They give me ideas to create more credible stories and readers don’t even take the links as endorsements, because they read them in a fictional context; maybe they’ll check them out of curiosity, maybe they end up liking the services, but when they come to my blogs they come to HAVE FUN. And I don’t care if Google says otherwise– I won’t give up on this creative fun. :D
When it comes to my professional side, though, I have to ponder things differently. I can always get as creative as I want, but I have to funnel that creativity in a way that gets me interested readers and possibly readers that will turn into leads and, possibly, clients. The creative child in me has to meet with the web marketer I’ve become since I went the freelance route.
To me, SEO is really about making sure search engines get a chance to index a website and get some traffic, but then it’s web marketing that brings in the leads.
I think I defined SEO and web marketing as close siblings some comments ago. :)
– Luana S.
P.S. No, I don’t believe in PPC; especially with web users increasinly adopting ad blocking measures that make anything AdSense or Speedyads useless.
P.P.S. Last year’s SEO client fell in love with one of my fictional worlds and thought it would help her business in a fun way. I was touched! :)
P.P.P.S. I’ll be using a different email address and URL for my comments here from now on. I think they make more sense to a SEO blog and the content of my comments. :) As for the Name format, it’s an experiment; you can edit it if you don’t like it, I won’t take it personally.
2004? Then you are already a seasoned expert. I started my SEO career in 2004 too! I think the creativity in SEO is about getting inspired to convince people to visit you, link to you, buy from you.
It’s not just about the technical aspects of search engines or manipulating them creatively.
Your “name” is perfectly OK, I have been suggesting that type of name entry in my last design but then I dropped the advice in my new theme.
Search Engine Optimization has always been about creativity. A lot of “SEO Firms” were selling snake oil but as Google improves it algorithm and learn to understand websites or as Google has been saying, “things not strings” then these old school brute force ways of doing “SEO” are starting to fail and badly at that!
I personally applaud Google in pushing out these types of simpletons.
@Tad – I feel a little awkward at defining myself a ‘seasoned’ anything at 28, but it’s amusing to realize I’ve been a webmaster doing SEO almost at the beginning of my ‘new hobby’. :) 2004 was the year of experiments: comparing searches on multiple search engines, submitting my little sites to webrings, directories and SEs, joining communities to add my voice and even creating a few to engage people in my sites’ contents.
Absolutely! That’s where the real fun begins. :D