Is SEO becoming irrelevant?

[geezer]

red

Absolutely no disrespect intended in my post. Please don't think there was.

In fact, why would I disrespect 'seo consultants' - I am one !
I have been (quite successfully) making my living for some time now doing exactly that, and have many very satisfied clients.

All I'm saying is that, speaking not perhaps for you, but for myself and many of my collegues and others in the seo consultancy community I mix with, it is frequently a surprise (although a pleasant one) that more website owners do not carry out their own seo.
Perhaps I'm being too honest for my own good here.

Many seo consultants are self-taught - certainly in the UK at any rate. Here there are no college courses, or university degrees in seo (at least not that I have noticed), so most people do exactly what I said originally, they teach themselves by reading up on it, experimenting with what they've read, practicing, perfecting, visiting forums like this and so on.
In fact I would caution any future seo client to be very wary of a 'consultant' who doesn't read up on his or her subject extremely regularly, as keeping up to date is very important if you want to be any good at it.

I have never seen an 'official' course on 'How to become an seo expert', and even if there was one, the skill is such a new one that at some point in the recent past, someone (the first teacher) must have taught tehmselves by...yep...you guessd it...reading up on it.
And yes, your right, you'd be surprised what else you can become an expert in if you put your mind to it. It's one of the most rewarding things you can do in life, in fact it is an important part of life.

Do you hire an 'expert' to cut your lawn, tie your shoe-laces, brush your teeth, or did you at some point in your life figure out how to do it for yourself, and find it's actually quite easy once you've worked it out (and a lot cheaper) ?

[kneelsit]

I only ever look at the non-paying results. This is when I am looking for information.

This single sentence sums up a great deal about why SEO is still of vital importance and IMO always will be.

When I first came on the net in 97. (using Netscape Composer to design some very rough pages). I do not think there was much payment involved anywhere, "GoTo" being one rare exception.

I started out BTI (Before The Internet) selling at most 10 or 12 of my product a year and paying over several thousand $ a year to magazines, newspapers etc. After setting up on the net I have not paid out a single cent for advertising. Laughed at Looksmart when they tried to extort money from us. All I have ever done is optimise my own site to the best of my ability. Today my sales are now almost 10 times the BTI figure and I am always in the top 10 results (not the sponsored ones of course) at Google and Yahoo and quite often at MSN as well ( which my logs show as only having 10% of the traffic for my keywords anyway.)

So is SEO still relevant? Too Bloody Right it is !

[simonm]

There seems to be a lot of opinions being circulated.

Google adwords returns between 1% and 4% clicks per view, anything less than 1% and the key term linking to the adword is closed.

Using Adwords it is possible to estimate the numbers of people doing a search on any particular search term, using site stats it is possible to see the incoming site visitors per search term to your site.

With a realistically focused title and description I expect to get a 25% click through rate on google per entry that is within the top 5 - ie visible without the user scrolling down. This can decline to about a 10% return from an entry on the 1st page. Subsequent percentage clicks on my site per search where I am on the 2nd, 3rd or 4th page or depends on the relevance of the entries ahead of my site.

These stats are consistent and are based on about 50 one and two word search terms in the top 5 positions and an equivalent number spread through the bottom 5 on page 1 and subsequent pages.

Relistically google adwords is important and a key part of my web promotion strategy, but has to be considered as just one (and a minor one) of many ways of getting visitors.

[janeth]

The truth of the matter is anyone can do SEO. You will also get more hits from the free listing then you will get from the paid listing.
Anyone can do SEO it is not hard. However it does take time. The problem is not that it is complicated but that most business owners have more important things to do then try and get there site in the top of the search engines. That is why people that cut your grass and wash your cars have successful business. Because they offer a service for people that do not have time to do it themselves.
If you read and study you can become an expert at anything. The question is do you have the time to do it yourself?
There is enough information on sites like mine and rlrouse for anyone to get a top listing.
The question is do you have time to do it yourself?
If someone ask me a question I have no problem giving information to help people that want to do it themselves and I get a lot of emails from people that have done it themselves.
That's how I learned, I did my site myself because I did not have money to pay someone else to do it.

[dmcgill]

Jeeze, I must have been sleeping. This thread has kept going..
Interesting stuff. I too started in 1997 when there were very few search engines. Getting on Yahoo was just a matter of finding and submitting to the right category and waiting. I remember getting a letter from a person who indexed my site saying it was indexed and he had moved it to a better category than the one I had placed it in.
That was then and this is now!

Now we have Google who really are the king-pin of search engines. MSM, and we all know dmoz has died or at least is in the final throws of life. Netscape owns the database which is filled with dead links but new engines are being launched every day with the focused hope of becoming the next "big one".
I am not an exception. We launched our search engine 3 years ago now and have our own data base. We recently partnered with Kanoodle and genieknows.com and push a few of their paid listings. One thing I found out that was interesting, most of these ppc engines do not even own a data base and only have a meta search script that pulls from up to 25 separate engines.

So... back to the topic.
There are as many ideas on how to make your page do well on the search engines as there are sites. I got an email from a friend not too long ago that the answer was not meta tags, keywords or any of that traditional stuff. It was recipicol links and only linking with pages that have a higher ranking than you on Google. Also, you had to have some content on that page that you were linking to that contained the same keywords as the recipicol link...

SEO's keep up the good work. You keep the flame going and the search engines just have to change the rules and all your hard work is down the tube. I know what I look for. Content. Does your page offer something, is it relevent with your keywords and description, is it easy to navigate and most important to me, is if I have to wander all through the page or scroll down 4500 words before I know what it is you do, you are not accepted. I follow a 15 second rule. If I can't see what you do in 15 seconds, I click it away.

One thing I learned in marketing 101 (way back in my university days) was focused advertising. I can be #1 on all the search engines but #1 for what. If I am selling computer parts in BC, and someone in Alberta finds me, I doubt very much they are going to buy. They are thinking shipping costs. But if I am #1 for computer parts in BC, and someone in BC finds me, it may convert to a sale. So.. that is where the SEO comes in, (I think) to help the customer understand how to market his or her site.
just my two cents
dmcgill