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Does SEO Still Exist?

Posted on 16. Oct, 2009 by VeryFunnnyGirl in SEO

Does SEO still exist today as such? In other words: Does what peo­ple imag­ine to be SEO still exist in the way the peo­ple define it?

No, this is not another “SEO has no future” post. 

Indeed by now we have arrived in the omi­nous future of SEO, at least some or maybe many of us. We don’t offer sheer SEO any­more. Search engine rank­ings and traf­fic, the defin­ing terms of the trade are just not enough any­more if they ever have been enough. Now you might argue that SEO has not been about rank­ings and traf­fic for a while already etc.
The pub­lic doesn’t know though. Peo­ple who search for an SEO def­i­n­i­tion on Google, even those savvy enough to search for define:SEO will find solely def­i­n­i­tions of SEO deal­ing with search engines, rank­ings and traf­fic or rather their improve­ment. I want to cite a few of the most find­able def­i­n­i­tions of SEO:

“Search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) is the process of improv­ing the vol­ume or qual­ity of traf­fic to a web site from search engines via “nat­ural” or un-paid (”organic” or “algo­rith­mic”) search results”

“Short for search engine opti­miza­tion, the process of increas­ing the amount of vis­i­tors to a Web site by rank­ing high in the search results of a search engine.”

“The true def­i­n­i­tion of Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) can be stated as a highly spe­cial­ized process of build­ing a suc­cess­ful web­site. We say suc­cess­ful because if a com­mer­cial web­site can­not be found in the major search engines, it is not successful”

Some of the define:SEO results are even funny from the cur­rent per­spec­tive, most oth­ers sim­ply sound very conservative:

“Search engine opti­miza­tion, the use of var­i­ous tech­niques to improve a web site’s rank­ing in the search engines and thus attract more visitors.”

“The process of opti­miz­ing one’s web­site to get bet­ter results in search engines.”

“Cre­at­ing and improv­ing a web­site so that it will rank high in the search engines and help poten­tial cus­tomers or clients find the website.”

“The process of choos­ing tar­geted key­word phrases related to a site, and ensur­ing that the site places well when those key­word phrases are part of a Web search.”

Now let’s ask your­self: In case you prac­tice or even offer SEO, what is it that you offer exactly? You might agree with these def­i­n­i­tions above still you in most cases will do more than that.

You most prob­a­bly will be active on social media not only get links but to do some online rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment. You will also try to improve the usabil­ity of a web­site, it’s secu­rity and it’s con­ver­sion rate. You will not only opti­mize con­tent, you will cre­ate it, not just any­thing but highly link­able or even viral content.

Now some will argue that there are bet­ter terms like

•online or Inter­net mar­ket­ing
•search engine mar­ket­ing (SEO + PPC)
•search mar­ket­ing
or even some more exotic terms like

•inbound mar­ket­ing
•find­abil­ity
•dig­i­tal asset opti­miza­tion
•SEO 2.0
Those terms most often include SEO as a part of them. On the other hand: Does stand­alone SEO still exist? Are there spe­cial­ists or web­mas­ters doing only SEO and ignor­ing all the other aspects most SEO peo­ple prac­tice by now?

The SEO we have defined at the begin­ning is the Ford Model T of our trade.

We don’t define cars as motor­ized black boxes get­ting you from A to B. Like­wise the Model T SEO of “higher rank­ings and more traf­fic” is an insuf­fi­cient def­i­n­i­tion from the past. An SEO who ignores social media, usabil­ity and con­ver­sions doesn’t do enough these days.

Some peo­ple might argue that advanced SEO meth­ods on the tech­ni­cal level make the good old SEO rea­son­able again but it’s like adding a new engine to your vin­tage Ford T. It still has poor aero­dy­nam­ics and prob­a­bly burns even more gas than a SUV.

What we do in 2009 is much more holistic.

We don’t opti­mize just one web­site or our own website/s. We opti­mize our web pres­ence. We not only opti­mize this web pres­ence on mul­ti­ple sites and ser­vices most of which aren’t our own or search engines. We mon­i­tor and man­age this holis­tic web pres­ence. We shift focus depend­ing on the tides. At the end of the day the time spend on your SEO work actu­ally should look some­thing like this:

•ana­lyt­ics 1h
•blogging/content cre­ation 3h
•social media par­tic­i­pa­tion 3h
•usabil­ity & con­ver­sions (A/B split test­ing) 3h
•clas­sic SEO (on page, link build­ing) 1h
Oh wait, it’s 11h of work just for “mod­ern SEO”? What about check­ing emails, talk­ing to clients, count­ing the money ? Don’t you ever sleep as a SEO?

You basi­cally can’t man­age all of them on a given day. Also call­ing all of this SEO won’t help you and your clients. When you sell them SEO they prob­a­bly won’t let you do usabil­ity test­ing and social media. They will rather tell you “write meta tags” or “cre­ate XML sitemaps”.

Actu­ally what we do is web pres­ence management.

You might call it what you like but it’s cer­tainly more then SEO and it’s more than search engine mar­ket­ing or search mar­ket­ing as well. It’s not solely online or Inter­net mar­ket­ing as you do more than mar­ket­ing you build actual web­sites and cre­ate actual content.

Does SEO as we or other the oth­ers know it still exist? Yes, but there are also a few Ford Model T left. Do peo­ple still prac­tice solely clas­sic SEO? I bet they do, but with each day these peo­ple become less and less. I can’t imag­ine you get­ting a high pro­file SEO job the­ses days with­out being on Twitter.

Don’t get we wrong. I love it when peo­ple upgrade their good old T and make a cus­tom sports car out of it. Still, I think most of us has to move on.

Related Posts:

• Bet­ter Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Struc­ture to Lean On. Use­ful Things to Bear in Mind
• Does Face­book Make Work­ers Less Productive?
• The Truth About SEO
• Under­stand­ing Search Engine Optimization
• SEO Tip: Canonicalization

Tags: model, other-words, people, SEO, still-exist, the-people, the-way, words