SEO

SEO is Not Dead: It’s Just Getting Warmed Up

It’s believed that many search engine optimizers and agencies have been beating the war drum against the search engines for years. What good search optimizers are hiding from the rest of the drum line is that SEO is not a battle against the search engines, but more of adaptability.

SEO is Not Dead

Over the last three years, search engines have done away with just giving search results.  Google may have set the bar with their algorithm changes but more importantly, all search engines are morphing toward the same end goal; Give the end user what they searched for.

Search engines have gotten smarter, faster and better with reducing all the tom foolery and shenanigans that black hatters and web spammers have been doing to skirt search engines main goal.  In the last two years, those spammers and schemers have found that the world beneath them was crumbling and it wasn’t a slow crumble.

Those who have been in a battle know that there will often be innocent causalities and wounded bystanders.  Businesses who tried to follow the guidelines still found themselves in a helpless hole with no light at the end of the tunnel.  Small businesses were quickly inundated with “SEO is dead” or” Stop trying to fool the engines.”

After all smoke cleared and blue skies returned again, search engine optimization remained in one direction, full speed ahead.  How has search engine optimization gained so much steam after all the changes to what the search results were being based off of?  Good search engine optimizers took action and opened their repertoire of expertise.

So you want to be a SEO’r in 2013?

  • Content is King – You better know how to write or someone who does. Start building content that is valuable to the search engines and equally as valuable to your users.
  • Fix your site – If you have good content, good products and terrible store to find this good stuff, you might as well just shut the doors.  A bad site is like a Walmart is a cussing greeter.
  • Repair dead pages – Nothing sucks more than a visitor hitting a page that no longer exists.
  • Clean up your image
  • Be social – Stop trying to sell on social media and provide a social outlet for your users to talk to you as a human not as a company.
  • Stop writing for SEO and write to your customers.
  • Keyword Density is NOT the focus
  • Stop fooling yourself – If you are trying to optimize for an algorithm belief, you are already lost
  • Reviews that are unsavory find them and help solve them publically. If you can find negative reviews, so can your client’s customers.
  • Data drive – Stop assuming you know how a customer interacts with a website. Use the data to help optimize for conversions.
  • Build trust – Optimize your discussion after a lead has signed up. When someone likes a whitepaper you have on the site, that doesn’t mean they automatically like the shoes you sell.
  • Mobile is not going away – Optimize the user experience for mobile as we continue to see a larger shift of searches going towards mobile
  • Zero Moment of Truth –  Provide users information, reviews, stats and whatever they need to make the decision to become a customer, lead or user.
  • Give credit where it’s due – Don’t let the “authorship” buzz fool you, this is real. Google Authorship is Google’s way of organizing content without duplication.

As you can see, SEO is not dead. It’s just gotten smarter, better and overall it’s just getting warmed up.

Author Bio: Ben Halverson is the Ecommerce Marketing Manager for Lorman Education Services.  Lorman provides business professional training to many different industries. Ben has written several other articles for ASM and Lorman on SEO and SEM best practices.  Working in both BtoB and BtoC , Ben has had a very large exposure to a variety of challenges in the internet retail and ecommerce industries. Experience over years of practice has allowed him to be successful in an ever changing landscape that many simply have been able to keep up with.

Vaibhav S
Myself, Vaibhav S is a Founder and Editor-in-Chief of TechnoGiants, working Software Professional, and an avid lover of Software's and Web Services. I love computers and also love to write and share about Tech-related Stuff, Computers etc with others.
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