Why SEO is NOT Dead

webpronews has put a Bruce Clay Video from pubcon 2008 saying that “ranking is dead” which was given spin by some people to put it as SEO is Dead (if we see google trends of this term, I am pretty sure this term is being generously used since 2005).

So I thought to put my own Blog Post on why SEO is Not Dead. Infact I will go ahead and say, even ranking is also not dead though its very difficult to take ranking as a parameter to evaluate ROI and results now (I think this is what Bruce Clay was saying, the rest of people who say SEO is dead are just trying for link bait)

Why SEO is not Dead
1. As long as search engines are “ranking” pages I don’t see “ranking is dead” phrase making much sense. Personalization is going on for years now and I haven’t seen it making too much difference in generic and personalized results. Also if you think about it, the chances of a showing 10 results for one user and showing 10 totally different results to other users are very less. There may be exceptions but eventually its the quality of the page which get highest precedence. Personalization is more for fine tuning rather than for showing totally different results.

2. SEO was never about Ranking - Those people who think SEO means getting on top of search engines have certainly not understood what SEO really is and haven’t got the concept of how business on web works. The only thing that matters here is ROI. If a person is spending $10k on his SEO campaign and even after getting on top of search engine, is not making any sale then coming on top of serps is useless. On the other hand, if the person is not able to come on top of search engines but still the traffic is up by 20% and the campaign has helped in getting more sales and more brand value creation then we can certainly call the campaign successful. So in short, its not about being on top but its about Return over Investment.

3. The way search engine rank pages hasn’t changed much and is not going to change much either very soon - Lets be honest here, most of the macro stuff as far as ranking pages is concerned is already out. The only thing search engines can do is refine things which they are doing by adding personalization and asking users to rank content. So the factors which make pages rank still exist, its just that some new factors have got added but this don’t mean that the value of old factors like on page SEO and backlinks have got reduced.

4. Net is Growing fast - Since the net traffic is growing very fast, even if you lose a portion of traffic due to personalization and factors like user bahavior, you can get compensated by new users. Saying that you should stop trying to come on first page of search engines because now the results will be different for ever user is total rubbish.

5. Your competitors are using it - This is one of my favorite lines .. if you are in a niche where you have 4 competitors, all of you selling same product and have similar websites and if one of them is using SEO to be in front of others then you have 2 options, to do nothing and to think that you can’t do much since SEO is dead or to take action and to convert lead into sales.

People are calling SEO is dead since 2005 (and I can bet most of them are making loads of money through SEO only) so to me, SEO is evolving along with search engines. But the traditional definitions are certainly meaningless and practices useless. If you can keep in pace with current search engine changes then SEO can give you huge returns (considering where PPC is heading!) and if you are stuck with link exchanges and adding keywords after every 80 words,then you are doomed.

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5. SEO for Youtube