The way social media has emerged and it has changed the way of online and offline business marketing has really been a surprise for me. The reason for sharing this statement is that I was used to a person who always had a firm belief in the effectiveness of traditional SEO techniques. Now, SEO techniques are going to be useless if these would not be supported by the social media marketing strategies. All i want to know is the opinion whether it is the good thing or not. Should SEO undergo the advancement procedure in the same way as that of social media strategy for marketing? Is there any major advancement that can bring up SEO as a king again?
SEO still is king, at least it seems that way. Most people still use search engines to rely on their searches and not social media. Social media indeed has risen a lot lately but SEO still rules over the internet when it comes to searches. But Social media has made some strides that isn’t easy to overlook, and SEO will be endangered if they don’t do something soon.
Social vs search is really mixing apples and oranges… People go to search to find things they know they want / like / are interested in… people go to social to discover and engage. Both are exposure opportunities but they are not suppose to do the same thing and the opportunity with each is different.
I think SEO has had its day, and that this forum is a clear reminder that clinging to the same outdated notions of what SEO was does you very little.
Yes, we all say that content is king, but ultimately content will only get you so far. The inconvenient truth is that backlinks are the key to success for SEO, and that this is something a lot of people think is very easy to game. All the spammers come onto here asking for the best ways to get loads of backlinks without realising that Google has some of the best minds in Computer Science working against their methods. SEO is neither an art or a science. It is a methodology of growth, and as Google slowly but surely reduce every avenue for spammers we’ll see online marketing and social media become a much stronger force.
SEO still has its place, but mainly as a set of rules that govern how a site should be run and managed. The off-page aspects of SEO are handled much better by marketing and ad agencies nowadays and as such the demand for genuine SEO is slowly dying out. It’s one of the many reasons why this forum no longer has a dedicated SEO forum, because the demand for SEO is dying and because the subject is notorious for spammers.
I think people generally comment that SEO is dead as SEO earlier was associated with keywords alone. I personally believe that SEO is anything that gets your site onto SERPs directly.
Earlier it was keywords that got you on high SERPs, in 2011-2012 it was unique and fresh content, now it is going to be your individual author rank. Because as far as Google is concerned, it now looks at authored blogs and gives a much bigger share of its trust signals to such content.
SEO is not a strategy, it is a trend, it only keeps changing but never dies.
[font=verdana]Very true, but SEO is more than that too … it is anything that gets your page onto relevant SERPs and encourages people to click on it, so it includes making sure that your title and description have maximum impact as well. There’s no point in getting to the top of the rankings if your title and description look so irrelevant, amateur or spammy that people go straight past them to the next link on the list!
There’s also some confusion out there about SMO. A lot of people seem to see social media optimisation as a way to improve their Google ranking … not true! If that was the case, it would be SEO using social media tools. No, what SMO is about is promoting your site through social media, so that people will find it through social media and be encouraged to click through to it, without ever going near a search engine.[/font]
Relevancy is important yes and so is making sure that your search snippets appeal to your site visitors. There is no point in SEO when your website is not conversion optimized. First step of conversion would be increasing click through rate in search results, which in turn is yet another search ranking signal and helps the site rank better in SERPs.
There’s also some confusion out there about SMO. A lot of people seem to see social media optimisation as a way to improve their Google ranking … not true! If that was the case, it would be SEO using social media tools. No, what SMO is about is promoting your site through social media, so that people will find it through social media and be encouraged to click through to it, without ever going near a search engine.[/font]
Yes I agree…SMO is literally word of mouth and it spreads via social media platforms. However, Google+ is one big social media platform whose posts also appear in search. Also, video sites like YouTube and Review sites like Yelp are also part of social media whose results are displayed in search results. So in many ways SMO and SEO are directly related to each other
SEO can no longer be compartmentalized into content production and link building. An effective SEO strategy should be treated like branding for Google. You want Google to view your site as being the most popular and authoritative in your niche, which means people would be talking about you on social media sites as well.
Google has always been headed in this direction (seeking real opinions on popularity), that is why they started counting backlinks in the first place. The only reason people though social media links weren’t helpful is because most of them carried a “nofollow” tag. Just because links are “nofollow” does not mean they aren’t helpful.
