Recently, Search Engine Land, a leading authority on everything related to search engines, published an article entitled, “The Death of SEO.”  The title was really designed just to attract attention, but the article itself took an angle opposite of the title, as it discussed why SEO will never die.

Why Some People Thought SEO Would Die

In a nutshell, many groups of people thought SEO would die because they had a biased belief that would actually happen.  That belief, however, had no grounding in reality.  Here are a couple examples to help you understand what I mean.

One group with a biased belief has been startup founders.  They have the erroneous belief that the best product will win.  When that doesn’t happen because of factors such as lack of marketing, they get upset with companies with inferior products that marketed them better, and disregard SEO.  Another example would be the Adwords/PPC crowd.  Some of these professionals failed when it came to SEO, so they switched over to PPC to turn a quick profit. Of course, to support what they do for a living, they’ll have to minimize the value of SEO.

SEO Won’t Die

When you think about things from a very logical perspective, it’s pretty clear SEO will not die.  Here are some reasons it simply cannot die:

Google needs some way of returning relevant search results.  The company has grown so much because it has been able to return more quality results users are searching for with more effectiveness than any other search engine.  In fact, no other search engine is even close to Google in that respect.  From a very logical standpoint, it’s quite clear that Google will need some system of determining whose content is of the highest quality and is most relevant to the searcher’s request.

Google encourages SEO.  Google itself tells you how to do SEO.  Well, it doesn’t mention too many specifics, but if you look at Google Webmaster Guidelines, Google outlines general principles and techniques for ranking higher in its SERPs.  If Google itself recommends and encourages SEO, it’s sure to stay around for a while.

Google is very powerful and wants to keep that power.  Google is a corporation worth more than 500 billion dollars and employs more than 27,000 people.  Those two factors make it one of the largest, most powerful corporations in the world.  What has allowed it to gain so much power?  It’s ability to provide what the market wants – quality search results.  The market currently uses keywords to find what it needs, so there has to be some methodology for ranking content for those keywords.

In One Sense, SEO has Already Died

From these three points, I think it’s very clear SEO as a science/profession won’t die anytime soon.  So, don’t listen to anyone who dismisses its value.  But, in one sense, SEO has already died.

Think about this:  10 years ago, “SEO” mean putting as many keywords as possible on a web page.  Then, a few days or weeks later, that page magically appeared at the top of the SERPs – if only it was so easy today!  Nowadays, in order to rank for multiple keywords, it takes a dedicated professional at minimum, and ideally a team of specialists because SEO is literally that complicated.  Yes, the SEO of 2002 looks nothing like the SEO of 2012, so you could legitimately say 2002 SEO is dead.

And, Google tests 15,000 or more changes to its algorithm each year.  200 of those are implemented, and you might publicly hear about 1 or 2 of them.  Eventually, the SEO of 2012 will die too!  Google will slowly make changes until 2012 SEO tactics become irrelevant.  What I don’t know is how long it will take.  I’m willing to bet, however, is that it will take less than 10 years.

Key Takeaway:  SEO is a Great Long-Term Investment

Despite its complexities and quirks, SEO remains the most cost-effective form of advertising.  Getting those back-links built and the content created means you have work done that will be providing value for years into the future.

If you would like to learn more about SEO, feel free to contact Devenia with your questions.