This is pure and utter crap. While I agree that SEO has radically changed (from a pure markup game to a link-building game), it's not going away. For a very very very long time.
The real estate on SERPS (results pages) are incredibly valuable... The first page especially so. Given that there are only 10 slots on the first page (and only one top slot), people will leverage time, money, and expertise to get placed there.
The rules may change, but the game isn't going anywhere.
This (Seo) stuff has been known for a very long time, nothing new has been released so the average person can rank higher than another - there is no 1 click answer, it takes knowledge and time. - Time for SEO is rented like time your employer pays you to program.
I don't think the guy is disputing that search engine optimization is relevant, but that the sleazy, slimy guy who tries to sell you SEO is selling snake oil.
While I agree that SEO has radically changed (from a pure markup game to a link-building game)
Changed since when? I've been receiving spam from people to "trade links" and list my site in their "link index" for years. "link-building" is nothing new, it's been around since it became known that Google's indexing is influenced by external references to pages.
Since Google, pretty much. And it probably took the marketing world a while to catch on. Certainly there are still plenty of folks who still believe that SEO is about meta-tags.
"There is only one thing that breeds success, and that is passion."
And when you've learned to fake that...
Seriously, though, he doesn't make any concrete suggestions about what SEO/SMM should be replaced by -- just "hire an internal evangelist" and get passionate, with a mention of personal branding (which links to an article which seems distinctly anti-personal branding). The article is like a mini-Cluetrain Manifesto, without the timeliness.
I wrote a lengthy piece for my boss a few years ago, detailing how to improve our websites and content for SEO purposes, advocating the use of blogs, social networking sites, etc, etc. Response? None, just "thanks, maybe we'll talk about this later." Then he went off and quietly hired some dodgy SEO company to artificially inflate our websites' rankings. He was faced with the choice of following something which was (to him) new and outlandish, or taking a safe "bet to nothing" (on the SEO company) for a fixed sum of cash. I'm fairly sure people like him will keep SEO specialists in business for a long time to come.
In North America, Google still supplies close to 70% of web traffic (according to study from Comscore). So SEO is still important. Now I think learntoduck.com writes this article for "link-baiting" purposes, that is for SEO purposes :-)
We're an SEO startup in Redwood City that allows websites to buy and sell static text ads. Check us out at http://www.ask2link.com or email us at: jk AT ask2link dot com Thank you.
SEO is what it is. Right now it isn't such a bad thing, it is primarily a bunch of best practices. They might seem elementary to hackers, but they are necessary.
I've never read an article by an author more out of touch of the real SEO world than this. Maybe he needs to be punched more in the head?
Here's the formula for writing an "SEO is dead" article.
1. Take on tech person who's not directly involved in building, maintaining or marketing websites for a living.
2. Send him to a conference where a panel of similar out-of-touch 'experts' decry the death of SEO.
3. Said tech person goes home all jazzed up about the concept and posts a Tweet or some crappy Facebook message regurgitating what he just heard without doing any research.
4. Is amazed at the response (because let's face it, their swimming in unfamiliar waters).
5. Writes article explaining all the wonderful things he learned about SEO and how SEO experts are scum and how the concept of SEO is dead in X years.
6. Profit?
The point is this guy is not living in the real world, where not every site is based on Wordpress, and not every business skyrockets to the top of Google rankings without doing any sort of optimization.
Lesson? Stick to what you know, and don't make conclusions based on what you hear coming from the mouths of Internet celebrities.
Wow you might want to research the author before making such claims. He founded a SEO company which he sold off a few years ago. He now is VP of Business Development at Lijit and helping them market and brand Lijit.
Anyways, he is directly involved in marketing websites for a living. Also, knows SEO pretty well as he built a company based on it.
Is "SEO" really any different than just basic "best practices" these days? I worked for a company in the SEO business, and I have to say that 99% of it just seemed patently obvious once you took some time to really think about the problem.
Don't over-abuse keywords
Keep your content fresh/relevant
Make sure the link text to your content reinforces the key terms you're trying to rank on (to the extent you have control of this).
Use sites like digg and stumbleupon to expose users to your content.
And so on. SEO is "dead" in the sense that basic HTML is "dead". It is no longer the mysterious domain of specially trained tech individuals. SEO is just something else that you have to know and do if you want to have any hope of your website and company being noticed in todays consumer world.
SEO is dead, but thousands of SEO consultants who are still trying to make money by making SEO out to be more than it really is are viciously fighting this fact.
I've come across plenty of companies that have no idea what it means to do "best practices". Companies can be notoriously bad at very important parts of their own business. Just look how many companies outsource accounting. They literally don't trust themselves to handle their money properly.
And just as there are dodgy accountants, there will be dodgy SEO/Social Media consultants. The key with good leadership in a company is being able to identify what's what.
Completely agree. Not only is the "magic" of SEO long-gone, people are sick of every possible avenue of the Internet being "leveraged" for marketing purposes.
This is yet another non-news blog post with a sensationalised headline (which, to his credit, he admits).
Here's another problem. The author hoists himself on his own petard with this nugget of wisdom:
Twitter, Facebook, even the biggest social network, MySpace, which was built as a place to market to young people, has been destroyed by the attempts to commandeer them by marketers.
So it's shocking, shocking that marketers would "commandeer" a service that was expressly designed to aid and abet marketers. Hm.
Well, non-news blogs posts seem to be more the rule than the exception these days :)
I've never been a MySpace user, was it really truly built as a place to market to young people? It always felt to me that it was built as the Geocities of the 2000's, and the whole marketing thing happened only after they realized:
a) they had a critical mass of users
b) they had no idea how to generate revenue.
Facebook wasn't designed to abet marketers - not in the way that some people do it, using their own profile to advertise their company. (Facebook Pages and feed messages are completely fine.) Neither was MySpace originally, though once it started happening they reversed positions pretty quickly.
I think he means in terms of placing ads. While it's nice to think that the founders of Facebook and MySpace really wanted to create ways for people to connect, in reality they were creating a service with mass-adoption potential in the most highly sought-after demographics. These audiences are golden for marketing and in some cases, it creates deep opportunities for demographics that were previously difficult to market to...especially teenagers.
What this guy is talking about is how companies are now trying to build lists of friends on MySpace/Facebook/Whatever for what is essentially "free" marketing. This is some sort of secondary marketing and probably wasn't the intention of the services as they aren't providing any revenue. When executed wisely, this strategy is actually really good and can actually provide value to the service, the company as well as its "friends". However, I seriously doubt the ability of most SEO's to adapt and succeed with quality results in social media. It's not as cut and dry as SEO and actually requires "white hat" creativity.
MySpace, yes. It came from a very corporate background. But Facebook really did start as a small little network for Harvard people that spread like mad. (I think if Zuckerberg had really been out to make a billion dollars with Facebook, he'd have been much better prepared with an advertising solution than he was. Considering how good the Facebook team is with innovating and expanding themselves, advertising dropped the ball - I think because they didn't prepare any solutions ahead of time.)
The "friends list" is exactly what I dislike about such systems. Especially on Facebook, where systems already exist to handle such systems benevolently. I don't think that counts as SEO, though, since there's nothing SEO to putting a page on a private network. That opposed to Twitter, where some people link to every single blog post they write to boost their link status. (Then again: I don't understand Twitter and probably never will.)
Twitter, Facebook, even the biggest social network, MySpace, which was built as a place to market to young people, has been destroyed by the attempts to commandeer them by marketers.
Where in the article does the author prove or even offer evidence that Facebook has been "destroyed"? In what way have the social networks been "destroyed"? Certain Myspace is in flux, but not because of marketeering. Twitter is destroyed? Really?
Gee, only the thousandth article I've read of this title. The nature of SEO will change, obviously. Those who don't adapt will fizzle out. That's always been true, though. SEO now isn't the same as SEO three or four years ago.
Black-and-white fallacy. SEO may become more difficult over time (it already has), but this article contains no logical argument or evidence to show why SEO would become "dead". As long as search engines are relevant, optimizing for them will be a living skill.
The real estate on SERPS (results pages) are incredibly valuable... The first page especially so. Given that there are only 10 slots on the first page (and only one top slot), people will leverage time, money, and expertise to get placed there.
The rules may change, but the game isn't going anywhere.