The question really isn’t whether SEO is dead or not. As long as people want to get their pages and content listed and linked in Google and the other engines, the process of increasing the odds of that happening will exist and it will be called Search Engine Optimization.

Never. Gonna. Change.

The question is whether or not the algorithms (and their human assistants) are so darn good and in fact measuring the actual level of satisfaction that your pages and content bring to real users so well that by optimizing your site for the users you have in fact done everything you could possibly do to increase your chances of the search engines ranking you highly for all of the search phrases relevant to your content.

That is the idea that Mike Grehan, and then responsively Bryan Eisenberg are getting at. Make the people happy and the engines will take care of themselves. It’s also the ‘Don’t Worry Make Them Happy’ song the Google Webmaster Guidelines have been singing for years.

Trouble is, it just isn’t true. The search engines don’t rank based on customer satisfaction. They develop indicators and proxies that they hope/believe should highly correlate to customer satisfaction, but keyword placement, word context, link structures and the dozens or hundreds of other variables they track don’t always hit the mark. The current results prove that.

So until Google starts surveying visitor satisfaction and using that data to rank sites in their engine (not a bad idea, but one that brings its own issues), it’s not yet time to cross SEO off your to-do list.

NOTE: I want to make clear that I completely agree with both Mike and Bryan on the importance of working hard to improve the core quality and satisfaction delivery of websites. I’d even strongly agree that it should be the most important thing you focus on. But we aren’t yet at the time or place where it’s the only thing you need to do.