SEO Is Dead. Long Live SEO (Or, why content rules).
I’m older than the internet. At one time, I actually created websites that were on the cutting edge of the technology that was available. That was 1995, if course, and there wasn’t much to html at the time, certainly not compared to today’s HTML5 and CSS and all the other tools that developers have.
One thing that hasn’t changed much however, is trying to rank well in search engines. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of optimizing your website for search engines. The theory is that if you manage to nail down exactly the parameters that a search engine is looking for that you will rank well in search results, get tons of traffic, and make millions of dollars.
The problem with SEO is that your target is always moving. Initially, search engines were very simple and could be fooled easily. There was a time when people would simply stuff their footers with keywords, change their color to match the background, and rank well in results. Once upon a time, you could stuff your meta tags, and you would rank well. Today, both of those things are very likely to get you blacklisted and removed from a search engine directory.
There are actual SEO professionals out there. However, much like Social Media people, there are also a number of con artists. Let’s assume that you want to rank well with Google, the world’s leading search engine. Google itself offers you all the information that you could ever want about making your site search engine friendly. They have free videos, articles, and Webmaster Tools to make it easy for you to let Google know when you make changes to your site. Here’s the thing, search engines are doing everything that they can to remove your ability as a webmaster to influence search results. The goal of search engines is to return relevant content when someone enters a query. Relevant content doesn’t come from pages that are SEO optimized, they come from pages that have RELEVANT CONTENT. Search engines try to determine which pages have the most relevant content based on a number of factors.
Which factors? I have no idea. The general assumption is that they look for pages that a lot of other people link to, pages that other people consider to be a great resource. How do they do this? I have no idea. To be fair, there are very few people that actually know what search engines are looking for. One of those people is Matt Cutts, head of Google’s WebSpam team. Let’s see what he thinks about SEO:
As a content creator, I believe that content is much more important than SEO. I also believe in making things as easy for yourself as possible – why bother coding a website from scratch when WordPress has such a great platform available, for free, for anybody to use?
I’m not saying that there is no future in SEO – those who can great both great content AND follow SEO best practices will ultimately win in the debate. Further, SEO isn’t going anywhere. There will always be people, especially in the 3Ps (porn, poker, and pills) industries who will push SEO in new directions and manage to rewrite all of the rules…at least for a little while. What I am saying is that, for most of us, creating great content should be the one thing that we focus on. For now, forget your META tags, and focus on giving your readers something that is really, truly valuable.
p.s. I borrowed the subheading ‘content rules’ from the title of a book written by C.C. Chapman and Ann Handley called Content Rules. It’s worth a read if you’re in the content business. Here’s a handy link to Amazon.com
