SEO is Dead, Long Live SEO!

Introduction

Jack Humphrey’s “Static Sites And SEO Are Dead: Please Make A Note Of It” has been making its rounds on online marketing blogs recently. Here’s an excerpt:

[On] SEO being dead. The context in which this declaration was made was when we were recently discussing the new results we’d gotten from heavy testing and the fact that what used to work for us no longer worked.

One might think “bummer, man!” Actually it is a blessing in disguise. With the right system for publishing, the right technology, tools and tactics, the web is easier to market on than it ever has been before.

…

It was a leap of faith, but we started publishing solely to please our markets without aggressively optimizing. Just like Google asked us to do. No hardcore late night sessions doing endless keyword research or inflating our keyword densities to cheat the system.

…

Guess what? My sites now enjoy a plethora of top 10 rankings in Google for scores of keyword phrases. Keywords people are actually using to find my site, not just “vanity” keywords no one searches on.

In short, the article states: “Traditional SEO is Ineffective, Time Consuming and Dead, Blog is the New SEO“.

Commentary

[This section updated: Late night blogging is not recommended!] It should be noted that Jack Humpery’s entire site almost exclusively focuses on blog marketing as an effecting method of SEO and the site appears to be selling it as a service.

Unfortunately however, not every company can blog – be it for legal reasons, company culture, “boring” subject of the company’s industry, lack of “bloggers-types” at the company etc.

Blogs are however elegant in that they do tackle the three main aspects of SEO:

• Build Content: A blog is an excellent tool for easily writing current, relevant content – of course, quality is dependent on the writer.
• Build Crawlable Content: WordPress blogs are usually readily crawlable and can be further optimized with tags, etc.
• Link Building: Assuming you write great content, people will find you, like you, and link to you.

More traditional SEO – keyword research, title/content optimization, link building – will always be needed. It is the baseline foundation of SEO. For example, for ecommerce websites areas like product URLs and product descriptions must be optimized at the very least.

Blogging is simply taking it to the next level. But like other past SEO techniques, blogs will eventually reach its saturation point nor is it appropriate for many websites.