SEO Isn’t Dead. It Just Got a Life

With every algorithm update or new announcement from one of the major search engines, there will inevitably be a handful of doomsayer’s proclaiming that SEO is on its deathbed. As always, this proclamation is unfounded, unnecessary, and quite frankly, unbelievable.

SEO isn’t dead. It hasn’t abandoned its role in helping websites achieve their goals of improving organic visibility to generate search traffic. It hasn’t stopped helping business owners engage with their audience on their terms and on their turf. No, SEO isn’t dead. It just decided to get a life.

Instead of focusing solely on the whims of search engine algorithms or manipulating the system for rankings, SEO has found new life by embracing the entire digital landscape. It’s embracing social media as another outlet to build relationships to impact organic goals. It has learned that it if wants to grow its organic visibility it needs to speak to the end user, not simply to the search engine.

Winning Friends & Organically Influencing Others

To be clear, just because SEO has learned some new tricks doesn’t mean everything has changed. The best practices that made it so popular in the first place are still very much important. Selecting appropriate keywords, optimizing on-page content and meta tags, and building a site that can be easily crawled by search engines are still fundamental for organic success.

It’s off-page where SEO has changed. What SEO has taken out of its repertoire is low-level manual link building, keyword stuffing and duplicate or spun content. SEO has matured and learned how to identify these tactics as unnatural manipulation; these low quality strategies have been exposed as the spam that they are.

Getting “links” from off-topic directories or irrelevant forums to artificially inflate your rankings may let you sneak by but they won’t do much in the long run. Especially when the links come from less than reputable sources.

And the biggest lesson SEO has learned is to stop trying to keep up with that fickle algorithm. Chasing the algorithm is like Keeping up with the Kardashians. It’s pointless. It’s mind-numbing. And this type of volatile approach to SEO will, at best, lead to minor short-term gains but most likely will lead to penalties and loss of business.

Instead of optimizing for search engines, it’s time to optimize for users.

SEO has learned that in order to be relevant and effective, it has to be more social and outgoing. It has to reach out to engaged users and journals and media sources offering legitimate value in exchange for authentic endorsement.

SEO has also learned to embrace reciprocation: be a good friend and fill up your karma bank BEFORE you have something to promote. Build the relationship first and establish your authority in the space and with the audience so that when you have a legitimate asset to offer the community, it will be received and evaluated based on your reputation within that community. In short, today’s SEO has learned to focus on thought leadership, social outreach and human-centered engagement.

The Habits of Highly Effective SEO

SEO has always been a nuanced approach to marketing but over the past few years especially it has evolved considerably into a delicate balance between art and science. Successful SEO has embraced the popular game theory concept known as “expected value”. We challenge ourselves to consider the expected return on a particular decision over an infinite number of trials. It’s learned that some decisions may get the attention it wants today, but that brief success is more then exception than the rule. It has embraced the fact that the right decision will occasionally (and unfortunately) not yield the results you expect. But, in the long run, implementing legitimate marketing practices as opposed to “optimizing for search engines” will produce more true wins than losses.

Sure, for every door that Google slams shut with a new algorithm, there are a dozen more ways to squeak by with less than honorable tactics. Gaming the system will always be a part of the SEO game as long as it provides quick results and easy victories for those willing to risk it. But for those who decide to take the easy way, it will only create a longer and more treacherous road to success in the future.
Search Engines Just Aren’t That Into You

The biggest realization of this more mature, more socially aware and likeable SEO?

It’s not about them. It’s not about a website or a search engine or keeping up with the algorithms.

It’s about the user. The users who visit search engines with infinite questions looking for a single answer. True SEO (as with true marketing in general) is about appealing to them and their needs, wants and motivations.

It’s going beyond being technical, automated, or dictated solely by process. SEO is not a one-size-fits-all solution that can be boiled down to a simple checklist. SEO involves engagement, participation, and legitimate membership into the community. It involves intimately knowing your audience and catering your marketing, from the on-page to the off-page, to suit their needs. Simply put, it involves being human.

So SEO has branched out to embrace content not for content’s sake, but content that the end user will find valuable and knowledgeable. It is talking to people and making authentic connections, earning quality links and endorsements, expanding its digital visibility in authentic and valuable ways. It has realized that by embracing people for who they are and what they want, and not trying to game the system, it has created a following that no new line of code can destroy.

When Google News Fails, Here’s How To Fix It

In today’s world of instant gratification, with Twitter often “scooping” traditional news sources, we still turn to professional journalists for accurate, timely news, and confirmation of the events that transpired. While “breaking” news offers instant awareness, we still want to read news accounts reported by trained pros, who have dug deeply for facts and have published stories that have been vetted by qualified editors.
Nonetheless, we want “fresh” news, and increasingly we want to sample viewpoints from a diverse number of sources. We definitely don’t want yesterday’s “fish wrappers” as dated print newspapers were once called. So we turn to online news aggregators, and one of the most popular, with more than a billion users per week, according to Google, is Google News. With good reason: Google News offers 72 editions in 30 languages, drawing content from more than 50,000 sources.

FTC Likely To Abandon “Vertical Search” Antitrust Claims Against Google

There are now enough indications to suggest that any antitrust settlement between the FTC and Google — and the FTC would much prefer to settle than test its case in court — won’t involve “vertical search.” An earlier Reuters report, probably resulting from an internal FTC leak, suggested that vertical search wasn’t the core of the agency’s case against Google.

Today Bloomberg is reporting that the FTC is “wavering” on whether to pursue a formal action against Google. In particular the agency’s own people (anonymous sources) suggest they can’t make the “vertical search bias” claim stick legally:

Federal Trade Commission officials are unsure they have enough evidence to sue Google successfully under antitrust laws for giving its own services top billing and pushing down the offerings of rivals, said the people, who asked for anonymity because the discussions aren’t public. Regulators are also looking at whether the ranking system’s benefits to consumers outweigh any harm suffered by rivals including NexTag Inc. and Kayak Software Corp, the people said.

This is huge. The “search bias” argument is the core of FairSearch and other Google critics’ complaints against the company. While much of the antitrust wrangling playing out in the press is about public relations, there’s a misrepresentation of antitrust law behind Google’s most vocal critic’s arguments. The implication is that somehow antitrust law operates for their benefit — it doesn’t.

Antitrust law is intended to protect consumers rather than competitors. Protecting competition is the means to the end of promoting consumer interests. But protecting the position of individual companies in the market is not an aim or goal of antitrust rules, although when abuse of a dominant market position harms competition antitrust violations may be found. As a practical matter it’s often competitors who agitate for antitrust action, as in this case.

While it may seem deeply unfair to rivals that Google can use its search dominance and traffic to promote services like Google Maps, Google Shopping or Google Hotel Finder these services arguably benefit consumers. And when they’re weak consumers readily turn to others. For example, Kayak’s CEO reported to CNBC a couple of months ago that Google’s travel search services so far had “no impact” on its business.

The FTC would have enormous trouble making the case that Google isn’t entitled to “discriminate” between services with its algorithm — that’s the entire point of Google’s algorithm — or that its “promotion” of Google Maps instead of Mapquest, for example, harms consumers in any way. Then there’s the long-standing problem of remedies and the US intervening in the SERP.

FairSearch has tried to answer these issues and critiques with a list of “principles for evaluating antitrust remedies to Google’s antitrust violations.” Attorney Marvin Ammori, whose firm has been retained by Google, argues point by point that these principles are “ill conceived.”

In Europe Google faces similar claims, arguments and issues. Any decision not to pursue the “vertical search” angle in the US could influence the Europeans to reassess their position on that issue.

Decisions are due very soon on both sides of the Atlantic about whether to bring formal cases against Google. However both sets of regulators would much prefer to settle and avoid a protracted and potentially unsuccessful (and therefore embarrassing) legal battle — if they can.