Monday, March 26, 2012

Is SEO dead?

By Bradley Bevan


The health of SEO as an internet marketing practice has regularly been questioned by people who perhaps do not understand what the aim of SEO is. The aim of course is to get a website to rank highly for particular keyword searches so that the user may find that website. So while SEO techniques may have died, SEO itself is alive and well.

The introduction of Google Panda, a collection of updates to the algorithms that determine search rankings, led many people to suggest that SEO was becoming irrelevant because some practices would no longer make much of an impact on search results. This perfectly demonstrates how people have sometimes misunderstood that what is most important to SEO is the outcome, not the processes involved in achieving that outcome. After all, nobody would declare that music was dead because tape cassettes made way for CDs.

The introduction of Google Instant, an update to Google Suggest, was also thought by some to be a sign that SEO was dead. But while Google instant may throw up suggestions a user hadn't thought of, someone searching for 'plumber in Leeds' would most likely not be tempted by suggestions such as 'plumber salary' or 'plumber in Spanish'. Furthermore, while suggestions could become personalised based on a user's history, the rankings aren't affected.

However, as plenty of people pointed out, the rankings for search terms stayed the same; it was only the suggestions that might have changed over time. The SEO is dead camp also seemed to forget that suggestions were merely that - Google wasn't going to force someone who began a search for Italian restaurants to instead search for Italian renaissance.

People have claimed that SEO is dead or dying for so long now that few people pay any attention anymore. The fact is that SEO conducted professionally is proven to deliver results. Nothing more could be needed to prove that SEO is alive and well.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment