SEO is Alive!
When I started out this blog in 2009 years I said what nowadays is almost a running gag: “SEO is dead“.
You could assume I am the most unlikely person to tell you that SEO is alive. Take a look at the context of my attention grabbing claim back then: I introduced a new kind of SEO, a better one.
For lack of any better term I referred to the new school of SEO simply as “SEO 2.0”
My blog is still called SEO 2.0 despite the “2.0” hype being long gone and most things “2.0” being self-evident by now.
I was preaching business blogging, social media and relationships long before they became mainstream.
Moving On Despite an Old Name
I could have moved on to become a blogging blog or a social media blog. Both topics are easier to cover and both audiences are by far bigger.
Despite that I stayed with the SEO, even lately while more and more people rebrand or “retire” the SEO in their names.
Google has been plaguing me and my clients with disastrous updates and penalties too. So there were plenty of reasons to throw in the towel.
For some reason I have stayed with SEO no matter what attention seeking bloggers are saying.
Unlike me they are not interested in revolutionizing or even reforming the SEO trade, they just hate it and want it gone for good.
When it was 2012 and the world was about to end according to the annoying doom-sayers everywhere I didn’t hide in the closet either.
I’m not the natural born optimist though. So it’s not just me laughing off everything and keeping calm and optimizing forever.
The reason I still practice and evangelize SEO, be it 2.0 or whatever is that SEO is alive!
SEO is all over the place. It’s reinventing itself every few months it seems. Everybody does practice these days by default.
The Never-Ending Challenges of SEO
SEO is alive and kicking and it’s exactly the way it makes me feel every day. SEO is challenging, never getting stale. Every day SEO is changing.
You have to keep up with the pace and you never get bored. Just look at the other disciplines I cover here: blogging and social media.
I don’t write that much about them any more because most of what have been said is still true. Changes are happening here too but progress is much slower.
When it comes to social media the names of the tools are changing but the game stays roughly the same.
With blogging it’s even worse. Most of what I have written about 5 years ago are the basics by now.
Every blogging beginner is writing about them. Why should I after a decade of bloging? I get bored with it. With SEO that doesn’t happen.
Waking up to a New Web Landscape
Sometimes I wake up and have to rethink my whole strategy because the changes that happened over night were so profound.
I don’t even exclusively refer to the updates that Google is introducing more frequently than ever or the other limitations they impose on us like
- not provided
- nofollow
- zero-click searches
For many SEO is becoming too fast and too difficult.
They can’t stay afloat. For others the failure of these people is an opportunity. While Google makes conventional SEO harder over time by almost completely hiding organic search results.
Google is showing more ads every year and obfuscates the fact that they’re ads even more effectively. There are still ways to get more people to view your site be it
- through Google
- on social media
- directly
I will be among the first people to know them, test them and report about them as long as it’s organic and you don’t have to bribe gatekeepers to get visibility.
The “SEO is Dead” Worst Case Scenario
Even in case SEO would “die” most people wouldn’t notice and still seek out SEO services. Just think about
- search engine submission
- keyword stuffing
- PageRank sculpting
Some people are still using them even many years after they have been deprecated or made completely obsolete. Only gradually over time the demand dwindles.
Yet the only reason I can imagine for SEO to die is that the majority of people and organizations will embrace the more holistic findability concept instead.
Government sites and colleges already do. By the time findability or any other enhanced version of SEO will take over I will be already there. It won’t be
- content
- inbound
- digital
or any other kind of marketing though. As I said before optimization is bigger than just marketing.
I can optimize without selling while marketing always implies the market and thus sales. Optimization is more than just marketing. You can even improve yourself not just websites.
The Who is Who of SEO
The ever-changing nature of SEO is why it’s so alive. The most
- versatile
- forward-looking
- open minded
- multifaceted
- pioneering
people are actively pursuing it. Others become doctors or lawyers like their parents demanded and stay unhappy for the rest of their lives.
When I went to school the Internet didn’t even really exist yet. SEO was invented while I was in college.
When I started out I had to learn by doing everything myself alas testing and reading forums.
I don’t need anybody to pave me the way as I choose the path less traveled of my own accord. Are you with me?
You rock, Tad. ;)
Actually, I only worked as a SEO specialist once – in 2012 – and two or three other times before that as a favor to website owners I care about. I mostly optimize for my own websites/blogs, but all in all I’ve come to realize that:
– real SEO is mostly on-page
– the reputation management, social media and link building side of it is mostly web marketing
To me at least, it’s like dealing with conjoint twins. Or very close siblings. So what I’m going to sell on my new professional website among the other things is consulting services that include web marketing that include SEO.
Also, my love/hate relationship with Google is coming to an end, slowly but relentlessly. I’m not going to use noindex nofollow in the robots file because I don’t want to prevent other search engines from indexing my websites, but I don’t care anymore whether Google penalizes them or even removes them from their index.
As my fiancé rightfully said, it’s not the webmaster who has to serve search engines; it’s search engines that exist to server webmasters; and users. So I’ll make sure my websites have all cards to get found by search engines to serve users— but if certain search engine companies get fussy about things, it’s their problem, not mine. I don’t put all my eggs in one basket and each egg is just one tiny slice anyway, not the entire cake. :)
~ Luana
P.S. I’ve found that user surveys work much better than keyword analysis for me. So I’ll still use the latter, but I’m going to rely on the former.
Sounds like a very healthy approach Luana. Good luck with your projects!
@Tad – Thank you! Good luck with YOUR projects, too. And this great blog. ;)
This is a great blog. SEO is pretty much alive and I never once heard that it died in the past. A lot of SEO experts still use keyword analysis and SEO for their online marketing business.
Desiree, you are lucky. I get pointed to a “SEO is dead” article every few weeks for several years now.
SEO is not dead.. Its converging…:)