Is SEO Relevant These Days?
Disclaimer goes right here….I have never cared about search engine optimization (SEO). As my good friend Robert Puddy always used to say, that should stand for search engine optimist.I have been addicted to ‘traffic exchanges’ since day one and I have never really monitored, tracked or cared much about getting onto page 134 in a Google search.
That being said, I know some folks live and breathe this stuff. But I have to ask, in the day of social media which is basically digital word of mouth marketing on steroids…Is SEO relevant in this day and age?
It’s an honest question, and I’m no expert in telling people whether or not they should focus on search engine marketing but I know this. When I ‘search’ for something, I tend to check out what my ‘friends’ recommend or even go to something like Wikipedia before I start typing away in Google.
That’s just me though…What do you think? Are you still using optimization tools? Or have you gone the ‘word of mouth’ route? Share your experiences and let’s get the discussion going…
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Just do all the other things right, like social media and blogging etc and SEO falls into place naturally
If everybody is talking about you then you wont be able to stop getting into google.
Search engine optimists all over the world are busy getting their links into twitter, face book, blog and forum linking etc
Yeah that’s a really good point. The more ‘newsworthy’ you become, the more links will be sent to you.
See my thing is that is ‘natural’. I don’t need to worry about that, all I need to do is be myself, hopefully people enjoy the content.
Natural search engine placement has always made sense to me. It;s the people who focus only on building links, etc that boggled my mind LOL
I don’t worry about SEO, but then I am not rich and probably never will be. LOL I’m content with the few referrals I pick up with my social sites.
Sally – thanks for the post. Ya that’s a good point. It seems to cost a ton of cash to do ‘SEO’ properly. That’s another thing that always boggled my mind.
Jon,
You probably have stepped on a few toes, with this one.
As for myself, I simply do, say, write and advertise… as I see fit.
And then I sit back and watch my stuff “ooze” around the net… lol
Great topic!
Carl
I have to disagree. The seo is very important. It started back in the 1990′s and then was recognized that it not only makes your site known, it can improve the value of the site. I am the opinion only meta tags which is part of seo, your site will not have the benefits of being higher ranked by Mr.Google and therefore you will have monetary losses. On my blog I do not make money, no selling allowed, I do want visitors and the use of seo will do that also.
There is also sem (seo marketing) have nothing against the use where wants to use it, please do. The black hat seo spam indexing, I do not like. This is the link farms or spamdexing, uses methods like keyword stuffing and article spinning that degrade both the relevance of search results and the the user experience of even having seo. The search machines have started a campaign against black hat, which I find correct, such methods are not needed in web. Many methods are not needed, but they are here and we as “web dwellers” should be interested to protect the search engine optomization, because it works. It is not outdated, it is always updated because those that use it are interested to see that it continues to be a factor of all web sites and pages.
Word of mouth, gossip is a big value, for which no seo is needed, when you have a big followship that is. I tell Jon, he tells Paul, he tells Tim super results. But for a newbie in web, he will not make much progress with a new site only seo. I mean that truthfully. So let Mr.Google, Mr. Yahoo, send these little mechanical robots or spiders (which I hat, 2 bit me lol) let them find this what they are looking for, let them send this data back to that web from whence they were sent and then you will see a change taking place with your site or sites. Seo is easy to use and it brings results 100% results.
Thanks Jon
Happy new Year
Jay if all the search engines went away tomorrow my business would keep rolling along like nothing happened.
Google for instance has only 3% of the advertising market, most people find things online becuase of personal recommendations.
Search engines want you to believe they are important, but their more impotent than importent
-I just read “seo” cost a lot of money. Yes, when you go and buy a course from a couple of hundred dollars or more. There is a cheaper way, it is called reading and learning and practice. Many books and good ones are available only price tag. Many of the marketers will give you these for nothing, for the cost, you come on his or her list. Still you do not have to purchase anything, in a short while you are expert on seo that I will lay my hand in fire lol.-
One more thing seo is not so dry and boring as one may think
Thanks
Jay Dee
Ok Robert each has his own opinion.I respect yours, just as I respect this by everyone. It would be a dull world, when all the Robert’s would agree with Robert and all The Jay’s would agree with me. When that would happen we could forget the socialization of the web, as all in web would be doing and thinking what Robert and Jay think and do, then we would have an art “follow the leader web” which I hope never to see. Each his own opinion and his own way.
Happy New Year Robert
Jay Dee
Carl – I lost 5 Twitter followers from my anti-SEO talk LOLOL
JayDee – Hey if it works for you more power to you. I just feel, for my business, word of mouth (social networking) will always trump SEO…It’s as simple as human vs. computer
I know Jon I value the word of mouth too, don’t get me wrong. That is just as important but for the promotion of Your Self, no seo with spiders crawling around can do that for you. lol
Thumbs up Jon
Jay Dee
I take a “once over, lightly” approach to SEO. When I build a site, I try to get some decent meta tags into the mix and I use the basic SEO plugins on my blog.
That having been said, I am not going to spend days and weeks constantly tweaking my sites for the sake of SEO. I will acknowledge that it is out there and has enough importance that I — to use my golf analogy again — don’t mind having that club in the bag. But that club is a specialty lob wedge, not my driver nor my trusty 5-iron.
Would being No. 1 on Google make me more money? Probably, if for no other reason than I could stand on a little soapbox, pound my chest and scream, “Hey, everybody, I’m No. 1 on Google!” But given the size of my operation (a 3-person staff, me, myself and I), I have to spread myself pretty thin already and really don’t have time to “educate” myself on SEO, because at the end of the day, I just don’t think it’s that important.
I hope Jon that in the future, I can come and visit you here, I enjoy reading here, what each thinks and it would please me a lot when you continue.
To all a Happy New Year I will see you in 2011 From twitter Jon I can send you some, I just got the 5 you lost hahahaha
Thanks Jon
Jay Dee
Phil – Great post. Thank you for that sir.
JayDee – LOL Ya, crazy. I posted this question last night on Twitter and poooooof I lost a bunch of followers…
SEO is more relevant than ever, given that so much social stuff is indexed (and bloody fast).
You’re right that you’re inadvertently creating search fodder by doing social things anyway. But inadvertently isn’t as good as the people doing it deliberately.
I think if someone wants to know a good film, resaurant, book, band, holiday destination then word of mouth is bound to be important.
But don’t forget, from a marketing standpoint, social stuff is about pushing info out to people, whether they need it at that time or not. and often the time is not right. When the time _is_ right, they still have to remember where to look or to SEARCH.
I have hundreds of good blogs in my bookmarks. But if I need something, Google is almost ALWAYS my first port of call – just to find that blog quickly. I suspect I’m far from alone. Even the most social people still use Google.
FB is the first page to overtake google for visits in a day but that was for obvious reasons on xmas day. Those people weren’t looking for info.
The rest of the year, google is still where a huge chunk of people go first and will remain so as far as search is concerned so ignoring it is foolish.
And if it isn’t google, if there’s a trend towards people searching the twitter stream, it’ll still take seo to be found cause you’ll have a new kind of page 1 to worry about
The boundaries are blurring for sure but some basic SEO knowledge is always going to give people a big edge over those that don’t bother.
As Robert says – just do all the normal stuff and you’ll be in google – that’s true up to a point. If I search for Robert Puddy or Jon Olson, I’ll find them. That’s because the phrase is UNIQUE and you don’t need to do SEO. Try being found for the phrase traffic exchange
That’s where SEO and old style marketing is important – so you can capture those people that have never heard of you and get socialising with them.
Troy – I have to disagree. Social is not to ‘push things out to people’, it’s to connect, it’s to share a laugh, it’s to be human.
I agree that these lines are being blurred but the biggest mistake anyone can have is to think social is about sales…
I think that in the online marketing niche, SEO is a dead end. There are too many big players with massive wallets and software to match. I spent a lot of time competing in the new Clickbank product launch market. I did all the SEO perfectly and would sit pretty well up until launch day on keywords like review & bonus.
BUT….when launch day came I would find myself relegated to page 3 and out of the money.
Marketing in any case is about brand and personality.
I’m not sure where people like Mike Dillard rank in Google page rankings and i have a sneaking suspicion that they don’t much care.
Why?
Because their brand does the work for them.
The secret sauce in Internet Marketing is personality dare I say near celebrity status and Social Media is the means to attain that sort of status. SEO is nice but I’d now rather spend my money and time on building my brand
I have to say SEO is one key part but not the whole part. SEO mainly revolves around getting back links, and if you are an active marketer and blog and just do the normal daily marketer stuff you’ll build back links over time.
However if you wish to rank for a keyword quickly then you need what most SEO people call “link juice”.
One way I use SEO is to rank a review site for product keywords. If you know where & how to get the back links you can rank for a lot of CB products and more.
Again though SEO is just part of it as there is more to marketing then just SEO.
Take Care,
Chris
If I want information, Google is always my first stop. If there’s no clear “winner” there then I start asking around if needed
When I want answers I want them now, not after 2 days of people getting back to me
I disagree. It makes a huge deal and it costs nothing. 68% of the traffic to my blog is from FREE search engine results. 15% referred, and 16% direct (email list).
The difference is in what you do. Follow the simple steps to make your site search engine optimized (SEO) and bam you’re good to go. You don’t have to spend all this money like crazy SEO people do
(which those tactics work, but generally aren’t necessary unless you are in such a HOT niche that requires it and makes $$)
Mark / Chris – Thanks guys. Love the comments and they are much appreciated!
Tim – oh for sure. Again, it’s the whole idea of the ‘natural’ organic rankings, compared to the people paying an arm and a leg to get on page 14.
I think search engines are very relevant…I think ‘optimizing’ is over rated.
Well ya’ll…
Marketing is all of the above.
Vegetable soup isn’t made with one veggie.
We all have our favorite veggie in that
bowl, but I think it takes a bit of
everything these days to stay on the
cutting edge.
Frank A
It depends. What are you monetizing? TE’s cater to the make money online, mlm or IM niches. If you’ve decided to monetize the hair regrowth niche, or weight loss niche, you darn sure better figure out SEO and how to make Google happy.
Alot of folks simply get tired of selling tools to the IM niche and opt to go sell things people are looking for – which, of course – requires a good working knowledge of SEO so seekers can find you.
Great discussion!
Kent F.
I always want to leave a reply at your blog Jon, but I never seem to have the time to do that. I mean I still want to post my opinion regarding the big issue e-socializing vs surfing and I have not found the time yet. Anyway, about SEO: No, I don’t do that and I believe I will never do that. Call me impacient, call me lazy, but I am not willing to devote any of my time to learn it. If I ever will be able to afford it I will hire someone to do that for me after I am convinced that it is MUCH more effective than my other advertising methods (it’s always a ROI question). I am off to my martial arts class.
George
P.S.: If a martial arts instructor tells his students to visit one of his pages or else he will kick their b..t is it SEO, social marketing or guaranteed visitors?
P.P.S.: Happy New Year to all of you and your beloved ones.
I think SEO is important, but a large part of it is all the social word of mouth, the more people are recomending you on their blogs, facebook twitter and everywhere else the higher you will rank.
So I would say if you want to get anywhere close to the front page in Google ( or any other search ) you are going to need people talking about you. In order to do that you need to be social and make your stuff worth talking about.
Make it easy for others to talk about you and share their experiences with your products or services and the SEO will fall into place.
Good position in the SERPS will only help you and the only way to get them is to get others talking about you.
So in a way you can look at your position in the search engines as an indicator of how many are using social media to pass along information about you.
Jon, I was being careful not to imply I meant making sales – I totally agree with you that the social part should NOT be about pushing affiliate links and what not in front of people. Very definitely any social activity should be about branding first, becoming an authority, having relevance.
But the social activities are push – you talk about what you choose to talk about when you talk about it. The timing is different. It doesn’t have to be a sale but it has to be something of value to the recipient. But push is on your timetable, search is on theirs. They may ask but I see people searching more than asking.
I guess that’s why I see the two things as very different and therefore complementary and anyone can gain by doing both.
I am not arguing against social stuff – far from it. There’s two big chunks of traffic on the table – you can go after either or both. Neither activity precludes the other, in fact each enhances the other.
I just think SEO is important, is relevant and will remain so. I’m not claiming to be an expert at it, nor to say everyone should do it. But it has huge potential to bring additional traffic that one may not be reaching through social activities. For my part, I don’t have an interest in optimisation to the nth degree. On the other hand, a little deliberate planning and being cogniscent of what people may search for goes a long way.
Thanks for the posts folks, much appreciated. I’m not trying to take a side, I just love the social stuff LOL But I do agree, search engines have a place still for sure.
IF your page isn’t at least tagged right even your social media links won’t work right..
SEO IS Relevant! No doubt about it.. if you don’t think it is, drop all your seo efforts and watch your organic visitors in analytics, or load it up in seo and then watch it, as long as search engines continue to generate traffic to my sites, I will consider it relevant..
I think SEO is very important and it actually goes hand in hand with social marketing or web 2.0 marketing.
The problem with SEO is only that it is very hard for our industry. There is a huge competition and the search volume is lower than in other niches. For example: I have some cooking sites and some fitness sites and each gets between 100 and 500 visitors from google daily with just a few days of work. For the IM niche these numbers are about impossible unless you rank for the most popular keywords.
Still, I invest quite alot into SEO to get Traffic Witch ranked for several keywords to get long-term traffic… once you are ranked well you will most likely stay there for quite a while. Another side effect is that you also get direct traffic, for example from article links or bookmarking sites or rss feeds etc. These pieces of content also stay out there and the traffic comes automatically.
Oh… and you won’t get much organic traffic without SEO… it takes weeks, sometimes months of work to get ranked in the top 10 for good keywords in the IM niche… and you are “fighting” against people who outsource all of this SEO work.
Absolutely Guido – and thankfully Google came out with “Caffeine” because before that it could take half a year just for them to index your page again if it was low traffic, which makes it even harder to judge and to improve.. things update a lot faster these days but it still takes some work, but definitely pays off in the end..
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