Recently I read an article by Ken Krogue with Forbes called “The Death of SEO: The Rise of Social, PR, and Real Content”. The claims he and Adam Torkildson made in the article were shocking.
“Google is in the process of making the SEO industry obsolete, SEO will be dead in 2 years”?!
How could this be? How else would Google or any search engine find my clients websites in an effective manner?
Thinking of going with a new SEO company? Do Your Research!
SEO or Search Engine Optimization truly is an industry in and of itself.
Many companies are like fast talking car salesman or telemarketers that will sell you on the perfect marketing strategy built all around sneaky SEO practices.
These practices are termed “black hat” by Google and when used, Google will penalize websites by dropping them in ranking.
So it is VERY wise to do research before beginning any search engine marketing campaign with a new SEO company. By all means check references!
But what types of SEO should you seek to bring traffic to your website?
When Website Design Austin Texas develops a website we provide the optimal onsite SEO that is required to give our client’s website a good foundation to be found in search engine results. This includes valuable Meta SEO, header tags, alt tags, keywords in the URL structure, interlinking with keyword anchor text, forward links and of course keyword content for the pages.
Starting with a strong foundation is imperative for an effective online marketing plan.
How does the offsite SEO or search engine marketing (SEM) come in to play?
Ken says “External SEO used to mean to write articles, press releases, blogs, comments, and content with embedded keyword ‘backlinks’ to your site. Now it is changing fast to include social media strategies.”
This blog article, in the past, would count as external or off-site SEO as long as we added internal links to other sites or areas of our own site. But from what Ken is saying, now a social media strategy is key.
By sharing this blog post on our Website Design Austin Texas Facebook page, we have now entered the realm of successful off-site SEO. This becomes even more successful when fans comment or share our posts.
What does Google want?
Here lies the difficult task of targeting the content to your audience so that they want to share or comment.
The question becomes, “…what does Google want? They want relevant, real content on the internet that people want to read and tell other people about. If Google doesn’t bring you the most relevant content when you search they aren’t doing their job.”
The same would be true for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. If we as a company don’t provide relevant content to you as the customer, then we aren’t doing our job successfully.
So what makes a successful SEO marketing strategy that brings traffic to your business?
Providing real, unique content via your website as well as social media platforms that provide information only your business can provide to customers.
Whether you are an air conditioning shop or website development company, you will always have something important to tell your customers about. And take the time to make it interesting enough so that customers want to comment and share with their friends.
Even though social networking marketing and management should be included in most everyone’s digital marketing strategy.
We are not convinced backlinking from high authority sites will be obsolete in 2 years. If it is done the proper “white hat” way following Google best webmaster guidelines we believe it will always play a part in high ranking websites!
Or maybe.. a quote from one of our own SEO Experts said… “Soon Google will only like websites that have Pandas on them”.