SEO is Dead
⏤ Say the people who want to sell you something less effective
SEO (search engine optimization) has been a staple for online digital marketing since the inception of the search algorithm that determines what ranks where. As “techie-preneurs” have attempted to manipulate pages and results, the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) have changed their algorithm to adapt as combat against this artificial presentation of web pages. In many cases, this has tempted web analysts to declare that “SEO is dead.”
The Facts about Search Engine Optimization status
Much like the “God is Dead” movement of the 60’s, some of this SEO death fervor has resulted in many misleading strategies and misguided advice. Here are some numbers to help you look at the state of search:
- Google search sends about 57% of traffic to website
- Facebook sends about 5.5% of traffic to websites
- Yahoo sends about 4% of traffic to websites
- Reddit sends about 4% of traffic to websites
- YouTube sends about 5% of traffic to websites
- Bing, Imgur, Wikipedia and Amazon combined, about 7.5% of traffic to websites
The results are clear: Google still sends about 10x more traffic to your website than the next closest source. With this being noted, you should make every effort to be sure your web site is properly configured to take the most advantage of the search results. Hence, you need to invest in Search Engine Optimization: SEO.
Crafting for search engines
Optimizing a web page/site is the effort of providing the search engine algorithmic crawler with the information it needs to determine what your site is about. Knowing what your site is about provides the search engine with the data required to answer the question most appropriately for the person doing a search. “Magician in Dallas”, not a top quantity search term, causes the search engine to look through its indexed data storage to see what websites have the authority and current answer to that particular question. There is so much more to page and site optimization than Title tags, H1 tags, images and videos. While those are necessary optimizations, comparing two sites providing the nearly same data, the one that optimizes better is the one that will rank better.
Building your page authority
And optimization also goes beyond what you put on your page or site. What do other people say about what you have? This would be something called back links. A backlink is where a link created on another site points to your web page. This site’s link should be built around the subject of “Magician in Dallas”. Now this link will provide the search engine with the authority that by pointing to your site, topic flow of the subject can be deduced. This reinforced deduction would further support the search engine’s algorithm of placing your site page above another. In a competitive market or niche, this type of back-linking would need to be repeated dozens if not hundreds or thousands of time.
Then next time you hear that SEO is dead, check to see if Google still exists. If it’s online, SEO isn’t dead.
