Mar 15
10
About those SEO is Dead Articles
There have been numerous articles suggesting SEO is dead over the years. Having been a SEO for over fifteen years, I have seen a lot of change in venues, techniques, tactics, and in the signals used to inform search algorithms. I’ve written before that while SEO dyes frequently, it will never actually die. SEO is about using the most effective tools to make a website or web-content rank well on search engines. Given the increasing number of uses of search, SEO can never die. It can however change, as all things do.
What happens in chrysalis when a caterpillar transforms into a butterfly or moth? After, the emergent butterfly has a far larger and more varied world with a wider array of abilities to enjoy in its short lifespan. It is most certainly not a caterpillar anymore.
The same happens when humans mature from child to teen to adult. You’re the same being you were when you were five but you have radically different personalities, abilities, and responsibilities. When you were five, you got to discover everything and get a basic sense of how it works. In between childhood and adulthood you had a jarring but hopefully amazing period of mild-to-radical weirdness as you learned new and sometimes terrible truths about the world around you. As you grew into adulthood you started playing with increasingly sophisticated toys and making decisions with real implications. You started impacting the world around you in several different and often more meaningful ways. You started doing things so differently, there would be no question you were not the five year old at the start of the story.
At no point in the process did you or the caterpillar die though you both might have suffered from time to time. Such is metamorphosis and such is the way of everything, including SEO.
The better query is defining the role of SEO in a much wider integrated web marketing plan. SEO is about analysis, observation, analysis, testing, improvement, and more and more analysis. It covers a number of parts of the field and seeks to explain how they work together to improve search driven traffic. While the market defines SEOs as players, successful SEOs act as coaches, trainers, and on-field analysts. We’re hardly dead. It’s just as we’ve growing so fast we sometimes hardly recognize us.
Jim Hedger
Jim Hedger is an organic SEO and digital marketing specialist. Jim has been involved in the online marketing industry since 1998 and a SEO since 1999. Best known as a broadcaster, interviewer, content writer and search industry commentator, Jim is a frequent conference speaker and organizer. He hosts the search focused radio show Webcology on WebmasterRadio.FM and is a WebmasterRadio.FM conference interviewer. Jim brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, passion and creative thinking to each project. Preferring a teamwork approach, Jim strives to inform and train his clients and their staff to run and maintain their own search and social media efforts.
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