SEO is Not Dead - Its Been Evolving For Years

As many of you know, I see the benefits of conducting an effective Social Media Optimisation (SMO) campaign. But I don't go as far as some in saying that it's "almost dead".Jim Hedger published a piece the other day about how SEO is changing. He comments "SEO has evolved so far and so quickly over the past six months that is is hardly recognisable from its humble roots, much like a Neanderthal placed beside any give Homosapien".

I'd disagree. I see the whole SEO evolving much before this. Patricia Seybold foresaw the change in the Internet marketing agenda due to an evolution in how business interacts with consumers way back in 2000 with Loyalty.com and 2001 with "The Customer Revolution". These books mentioned the greater involvement the Internet had with the buying decisions of consumers and how those processes are affected by the reality and perception of the levels of customer service from a given organisation.

The factors that he speaks about (RSS feed-readers, social media, specific vertical search tools and multimedia) have been around for years. All that's changed is the media's focus on them. Forum's have been created around niche topics for years. There's nothing new with consumer power. These forums, blogs and vertical sites have always been crawled by Google et al. They've always been a very useful tool to leverage your own rankings. Just look at why Google changed their algo about 4 years ago to limit the impact of link campaigns using forums!

Not only has the media's attention changed, but also that of SEO/marketing agencies. Each agency is trying to find ways to differentiate themselves from the competition - just like Tradedoubler buying The Search Works. They did this to say "look at us, we can offer you all these seamless services" (as well as buying a shed load of customers directly).

The most interesting of features that I don't think the majority of search engineers have picked up on is that PR and SEO has almost merged into an amorphous entity. Brand reputation management now goes hand-in-hand with SEO. But you need the SEO skills built up over a number of years to truly fulfill your client's needs when it comes to SMO.

Now I believe that Jim has gone too far when he says that "the final nail in the coffin of traditional SEO was the introduction of Google's personalised results". For a start, the user has to be logged in and enjoy the way it works. People like to use the Internet for different reasons at different times. At one stage it'll be information retrieval and the next product review. Jim goes on about utilising social media bookmarks to leverage SEO as well as changing how you use titles, tags, text, structure and links. I'd have to disagree. Just focus on making your site the best it can be for the end-user. Make it easy to buy from if it's an e-commerce site or make it easy to digest if its an information site. It's not rocket science.

When I consult for Pazang's clients I say you need to look at a holistic marketing plan. Utilise offline PR to augment your online exposure, monitor your brand and your competitors brand online, take every effort to make it easy for your customers to do business with you, allow them to refer you to friends, reward repeat custom but most of all get the basics right!

SEO is a key ingredient and there's one constant factor - you'll always have to modify you SEO strategy, but you'll never have to rewrite it.