I have been noticing over the past few months many talking about the death of SEO. SEO is dead is what is being touted by the uninformed, merely because the way they are used to doing it is through attempting to manipulate the search engines. Then when new algorithms come out that nullify the previous attempts to game the system, many people freak out and start crying because they’ve lost what they thought was an advantage given them by their tricks.
Often times they find themselves actually worse off due to penalties.
For more on this, check out the article:
Help I think I may have a Google Search Engine Penalty
In truth, SEO is not dead, far from it. It has merely evolved into a system where there are now more checks and balances than there have been before. Remember the days when you could simply cram keywords, stuffed into a page and calculate the number instances they appeared to see if the page was ‘optimized’?
Yeah, there are still people even today that care about percentage density of keywords. The new paradigm has shifted more towards the creation of usable and original content that is engaging.
So, anyone can write for the search engines. Its easy to fool a bot into thinking that this page is all about a specific topic. There are still ways to game the system. Its just that its becoming less and less worthwhile to do it.
My long winded answer is absolutely SEO is still very much an integral part of making a successful website.
Paying attention to how you serve your customers and what value is offered is of far greater importance for the long term success of the site. Keyword research is still a very important part of SEO but it should be used to direct the flow of information and how to best organize it. Its merely a guide.
If I were to write an article, say, about sighting a rifle, the words I would choose to communicate that information should be governed by what makes sense to the user and how the vast majority of people find that information. Once you know that most of these people search for information in a particular fashion, you can now structure your content titles, introduction etc, in the way that best grabs their attention.
I would say, as do many other people far wiser than I, that if you focus your efforts on valuable insightful content, whether that be video, audio, images or text, your audience will naturally gravitate towards you. They will naturally share your content and link to it, which is less work than trying to buy links or spam blogs to get traffic to your site. I am not saying that one should not have a link building strategy. Link building can be very rewarding if done correctly and with specific goals and objectives in mind.