Yes, the word has travelled fast about what Matt Cutts of Google said at SXSW just a few days ago. The words “SEO is dead” have spooked many business people and SEO practitioners alike.
Quite frankly, the only people who should be worried are the businesses and SEO’ers who are abusing the current system. SEO is not dead. SEO as we know it is evolving into a more content-focused entity.
Those who are worth their salt and have been doing SEO properly will make the transition just fine. There will be changes…most notably RDFa tags replacing current tag configurations as a prominent piece of the indexing puzzle. The bottom line is this:
Google is creating an algorithm to filter out crappy content that has been over-optimized and penalize those sites for it. Well thought-out and well written content that is properly optimized is still relevant.
Heck, you still have to have the right key words on your site in order to be found in the right places.
I found a brilliant article online that explains the situation just perfectly. It’s written by Scott Ensign of DAC Group and will put your mind at ease as to what it all really means. Here is my favorite excerpt from the article:
“Cutts said that, as part of Google’s ongoing effort to rank the most relevant results (i.e., the ones most satisfying to the user), their engineers are actually developing a way to promote good content (regardless of how “optimized” it is) over content that might not be as good, but has clearly had some work done from an SEO perspective.
In a sense, this should be no great surprise. The kind of “over optimized” content that Cutts is referring to is often not a very good result if you’re the actual searcher. As such, this fits into the overarching Google theme that good content should win.”
I highly recommend you read the entire article. It’s a pretty quick read…and a very important one for you and your business.
Click here to read the whole article on DAC Group’s website.
And remember…SEO is not dead. Your website still has to be optimized with the right words in the right places. It’s just that the ridiculous abuse of SEO methods by spammers and black hatters has come to a head and change is on the horizon to protect those of us who are doing our optimization and Internet marketing with integrity.
In closing, this quote from Springboard SEO over a year ago really says it all with regard to these changes:
“SEO is not the problem. People that use SEO to index garbage content of no value are the problem.”
For more tips or to ask any questions, shoot me an email or call me at 717-538-8940.
