SEO is Dead, Or Is It?
By Craig Danuloff
When Mike Grehan says SEO is Dead it’s a little like Martha Stewart telling you that Twinkies with candles make a fine wedding cake. Yet that’s what he said. The release of Google Universal Search Results and the new Ask had so much impact on him that a man who’s probably spent as much time as anyone trying to grok the engine’s algorithms seems to have thrown up his hands and cried uncle.
His argument, if I understand it correctly, is that these newfangled results are so darn good, and so attractive with all the images and videos and maps and pricing and other useful stuff, that finally ‘better marketing counts’ and SEO techniques are now just plain uninteresting. He implies that getting a text listing on these multimedia pages isn’t even worth the effort.
This is where I lose him. Don’t you have to ‘optimize’ to get a listing near the top of that first page regardless of the type of content you hope to have listed? Don’t you still have to be selected as one of the 5-10 most relevant results in the world to appear on that page? Isn’t that selection going to be done based on some scoring criteria and isn’t SEO the process of figuring out that scoring criteria and then putting those points on the board?
It’s impossible to argue that if it’s relevant to the search term anyone wouldn’t prefer to have an image, or video, or other piece of visually interesting content appear. But when that’s not relevant or possible I’m sure most would be happy to have a top text link with good title copy and a great descriptive snippet. Isn’t search engine optimization still the only way to get that spot? What exactly am I missing?
Comments
Mike's argument, and one that he's been making for a few years, is that it is more than the code and the content of pages that determine how well one will do with search engines and searchers - it's also an understanding of who your users are, and how your pages (and other offerings) might meet their needs, and how best to provide that content to those people.
When links to pages share search results sets with video, definitions, maps and business listings, Q&A answers, advertisements, and more, an SEO needs to have a skill set that is much greater than just the understanding of how to address individual pages ranking in those search results.
Mike challenged the Eisenberg's to provide a new definition of SEO. I think that for SEOs who have been paying attention, that new definition isn't needed - but I do like the one that Brian Eisenberg came up with in response to Mike's article - End Searcher Optimization: The New SEO.
There still is value to making sure that a strong foundation exists for letting a search engine crawl and index a page, and serve results for that page. And, the concept of understanding who the audiences are for a page hasn't changed at all.
Search engines have evolved, and SEO is evolving in response. That evolution does need to be attached to an understanding of marketing - but the best SEO always has been.
Posted by: Bill | June 24, 2007 11:49 AM
I agree Bill. But you make it very clear - how well you will do with 'Search Engines and Searchers' and my point is that in many ways those are two different questions, although cleary and increasingly there is the same answer to both.
My problem with what Mike wrote is that he implies that now if you just serve the users, the engines will take care of themselves. I don't think that's true. Knowing that you need to serve both, and that in some cases actions will benefit both, is great.
For along time many SEOs have acted as if doing things that address the needs of the engines alone was all that mattered. That is wrong and I think you make that case well. I think an equal mistake is thinking that taking care of the users is all that matters. Both matter. You make that clear with the statement that 'SEO needs to be attached to an understanding of Marketing'. I think that is what Mike meant but it didn't really read that way.
I saw Bryan's reply and will post on that soon.
Posted by: Craig Danuloff | June 24, 2007 12:04 PM
I believe that SEO is alive, but the princples are not new at all. It is simply about relevance, and the fundamentals are just everyday publicity, or PR.
http://youngbusinessman.typepad.com/youngbusinessman/2007/06/seo_is_dead.html
Posted by: Simon Small | September 10, 2007 12:06 AM