Is SEO Dead?

[janeth]

I woke up this morning and had gotten an email from John asking me to take a look at a post over in another forum, that I'm a member of. The thread is talking about search engine optimization being dead and while I believe it is dead and will get into that in just a moment I want to address a point John made in the thread about using W3C.

W3C does not have anything to do with SEO and validating your site is not going to help you get traffic. You chances are better showing up at the Indy 500 with a 3 hp go kart than to make a living with traffic you get from validating your site.

Now on to the death of SEO.

I think SEO has been dying for a long time but the personalization is not what is killing it. About the only people that know what personalization is, is the SEO's. The average Joe is going to go to Google and type in what they are searching for and that will be that. They do not spend enough time online to worry about personalizing their search results. I spend about 15 hours a day online and have not personalized mine, until about 5 minutes ago just to see what all the fuse is about. I do not see this becoming something that is used very much.

But I do believe SEO is dead

1.I've seen more than my fair share of people that are asking questions about SEO one day and the next day they have started an SEO business.

It has to be one of if not the easiest business to start. All you need is a website and to spend an hour on a couple forums and you have enough information to fake it tell you make it.

2.The guy that has just started his SEO business feels that he can charge $100.00 a month and get 100 customers and live happily ever after. This is not the case, in most cases SEO is a full time job and to get one site to rank can take you 60 hours a week for the next 8 months.

3.Most people want to promise the ranking for 10 keywords but to get the traffic needed to run an online business you need more in the range of 10,000.

4.The average Joe does not have the dedication to run his own business much less spend the needed time on your site to make it rank and get the traffic needed to run a real business.

5. The average customer is not going to wait for more than about 3 months without seeing the needed results before wanting out of the game.

6.The client agrees on getting so many keywords ranked in the top ten but when he finds those keywords do not bring in enough traffic to sustain his/her site they become upset and want more for the same price.

7.There are no guarantees, no matter how much you know or how many sites you have ranked in the past there are no guarantees that you will be able to rank the next one.

8.Doing it correctly means trying to rank the client for enough keywords that it will have an impact on his/her business. In most cases this means thousands of keywords. After making a list of the keywords you now need to build thousands of pages of unique text. After that you need to optimize those pages and start link building for each page.

I no longer do SEO, but have done it on and off in the past and have worked with customers who make in excess of $100,000.00 per month. I've also seen more than my fair share of so called SEO's asking for help in finding clients and a lot of them do cold calling.

If the SEO's are able to make you so much money than why do so many of them go to forums and cold calling to get clients.
Because their services do not work for themselves, yet they want to sell the services that they already can not make work to you.

Most of the SEO's that have figured out how to make it work only do consulting or sell ebooks. They know it is both a pain in the ass and a huge responsibility to take on a client. By selling an ebook or only telling the client what to do they place a spacer between themselves and the responsibility.

I guess what I'm saying is that SEO is dead because

1.Most SEO's do not know how to rank a site
2.The SEO does not charge enough money for the service and is unable to complete the task
3.The SEO is only trying to rank the site for a couple keywords

In most cases once a customer gets burned by a service he goes looking for other ways to make money and is no longer willing to spend more money for the SEO service.

[incrediblehelp]

SEO is not dead it probably will never be dead. It will evolve like any other technology out there. In fact I don't think of SEO as SEO anymore. I think of my work more like online marketing. I do so much more than just achieving rankings for clients.

Now what I think this should read is "SEO Black Hat is Dead". Tricking the SE's will be much harder and much less effective with personalization search.

Now it is my feeling that personalization of search is more of cry for help from the SE themselves. They have basically announced that they simply cant compete with the spammers, so why not let your personal demographics and searching history decide the fate of the SERPs. Terrible.

It is still to early to tell how this will shake out and if the average Joe will be happier or worse off with the personalized search on, but until Google FORCES the average Joe to even sign into personalization search I wont worry to much about it.

[janeth]

I think it takes the social media sites, articles and PPC to make a site work online. I think if the others are done correctly than the SEO will take affect on it's own without having to do anything.

[Webnauts]

I must repeat here my comments I posted in my forums:

Originally Posted by janeth

I woke up this morning and had gotten an email from John asking me to take a look at a post over in another forum, that I'm a member of. The thread is talking about search engine optimization being dead and while I believe it is dead and will get into that in just a moment I want to address a point John made in the thread about using W3C.

I am afraid that you missed the point here. I am not talking about W3C validation itself. I am talking about the whole site semantical structure, which W3C have defined perfectly, before search engines even existed.

Originally Posted by janeth

Now on to the death of SEO.

I did not say that SEO is dead. I said SEO tricks are dead. Just to be clear here.

Originally Posted by janeth

I think SEO has been dying for a long time but the personalization is not what is killing it. About the only people that know what personalization is, is the SEO's. The average Joe is going to go to Google and type in what they are searching for and that will be that. They do not spend enough time online to worry about personalizing their search results. I spend about 15 hours a day online and have not personalized mine, until about 5 minutes ago just to see what all the fuse is about. I do not see this becoming something that is used very much.

I do not spend even a minute for all that. Look at the end of one of our articles or tutorials we published on our site, which you may find one here http://www.seoworkers.com/seo-articles-tutorials/ to see how we deal with that.

Originally Posted by janeth

I guess what I'm saying is that SEO is dead because

1.Most SEO's do not know how to rank a site
2.The SEO does not charge enough money for the service and is unable to complete the task
3.The SEO is only trying to rank the site for a couple keywords

In most cases once a customer gets burned by a service he goes looking for other ways to make money and is no longer willing to spend more money for the SEO service.

All above its really true. But seems like for us SEO is not dead, as we do exactly the opposite others do, as you mentioned above.

[kgun]

The main thing now is SERP penetration. SEO is a moving target that has a long tail getting longer and longer.

Web advertising and digital branding, call it SEO, SEM, Word of mouth ad, social networking or whatever has come to stay. That does not imply that everyone that claims to be a SEO expert is it.

I am a SEO observer.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

SEO is not dead it probably will never be dead.

If web designers become more competent, I fear it will.

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

It will evolve like any other technology out there.

What other technologies? I would like to hear your thoughts about that.

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

In fact I don't think of SEO as SEO anymore. I think of my work more like online marketing. I do so much more than just achieving rankings for clients.

Then you are not only doing SEO, as SEO is just a part of Web Marketing.

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Now what I think this should read is "SEO Black Hat is Dead".

The title of my thread in my forums was: SEO Tricks Dead Soon?. Just to avoid some confusions.

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Tricking the SE's will be much harder and much less effective with personalization search.

That is was I love about all this.

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

Now it is my feeling that personalization of search is more of cry for help from the SE themselves. They have basically announced that they simply cant compete with the spammers, so why not let your personal demographics and searching history decide the fate of the SERPs. Terrible.

What is wrong with that?

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

It is still to early to tell how this will shake out and if the average Joe will be happier or worse off with the personalized search on, but until Google FORCES the average Joe to even sign into personalization search I wont worry to much about it.

I worry about this, as I am willing to be in this business in the future too. ;)

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by kgun

The main thing now is SERP penetration. SEO is a moving target that has a long tail getting longer and longer.

Web advertising and digital branding, call it SEO, SEM, Word of mouth ad, social networking or whatever has come to stay. That does not imply that everyone that claims to be a SEO expert is it.

I am a SEO observer.

If you are a SEO observer, don't mix up SEO, SEM, SMO and so on. Then stick on SEO.

But I think you never managed to make a difference between those terms.

All those terms fall under the hat of Web Marketing.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by janeth

I think it takes the social media sites, articles and PPC to make a site work online. I think if the others are done correctly than the SEO will take affect on it's own without having to do anything.

Do you that mean Social Media, articles and PPC can replace SEO? That sites will not need to be optimized?

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

What is wrong with that?

I don't agree with the idea that if someone cant perform a task/job, you can simply go ask someone else to do it.

Search engines their primary job is to serve relevant results with their algorithms. Since they are having trouble doing that they are now deciding....hey why don't we just monitor your work stations activities and customize search to that. I think the whole concept is biased and in the long run not a effective way to handle the global indexing and rating of the worlds websites.

[kgun]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

But I think you never managed to make a difference between those terms.

John, that is a prejudice.

Make the following search:

SEO kgun site:www.webproworld.com

What is happening now, can be explained with elementary economic theory.

• Entry is very easy, almost free.
• As competition increases, pure profit will be driven to zero for most SEO companies.
• As the SEO market mature, some big players will be bigger.

[kgun]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

I did not say that SEO is dead. I said SEO tricks are dead. Just to be clear here.

John do you mean that dirty tricks and / or criminality is dead?

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by kgun

Make the following search:

SEO kgun site:www.webproworld.com

Kjell make the following search:

SEO webnauts site:www.webproworld.com

and this:

SEO webnauts

[janeth]

Originally Posted by kgun

SEO is a moving target that has a long tail getting longer and longer.

And as it gets longer you have to have more keywords. The more keywords means more text and links going to new pages that you have to create.

[kgun]

John, but I have never made a statement like this:

But I think you never managed to make a difference between those terms.

I like minimalism, so I shall stick to SEO if I continue the discussion.

But I arrest you for dirty tricks if you don't do the same LOL

[janeth]

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Do you that mean Social Media, articles and PPC can replace SEO? That sites will not need to be optimized?

Yes that is what I mean.

[janeth]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

I don't agree with the idea that if someone cant perform a task/job, you can simply go ask someone else to do it.

Search engines their primary job is to serve relevant results with their algorithms. Since they are having trouble doing that they are now deciding....hey why don't we just monitor your work stations activities and customize search to that. I think the whole concept is biased and in the long run not a effective way to handle the global indexing and rating of the worlds websites.

And whats worst than that is forcing people to use the nofollow tag.