SEO News: Why SEO Will Never Go Away

Firstly, SEO isn’t just about getting sites ranking and I think many people still don’t necessarily realise this. Search engine optimisation is a powerful business tool that is proven to aid user experience, site speed, relevance to visitors, conversions and much more.

Back in ‘the day’ it used to be a case of using quite primitive tactics that played on the usage of keywords and link pools to manipulate the rankings and how Google perceives a site in order to get it ranking better.

This made search rankings too easy to manipulate and people could easily dominate any particular niche with any old website and make money through ads, affiliates and referrals. As a result, Google had to get smart. It couldn’t allow poor quality sites to rank better than those that worked hard to create a great website that focused on its visitors so the algorithm had to evolve.

As a result SEO is now much more about proving a great user experience through fast sites that are rich in unique, useful and engaging content, site that give customers and visitors what they want.

Google have started to look at user engagement to determine if a site is worthy of having prominent positioning based on the users activity on the site without the need for Google Analytics.

More recently, social elements have been incorporated into SEO too. An SEO campaign isn’t an SEO campaign without social sharing and activity and is much harder to manipulate so is likely to become a much stronger ranking factor as time goes on.

As these new elements continue to be brought into the search engine giant’s ranking algorithm SEO will continue to evolve to improve a site based on what works to gain rankings and to gain leads and sales. And as the algorithm evolves the job of an SEO consultant HAS to incorporate all of these elements into a campaign and evolve too to ensure the best user experience if high positions are to be gained and maintained on an ongoing basis.

I, for one, am up for change but still see many other companies using old and outdated tactics that will eventually work against them and their clients.

It’s the SEO companies that are flexible and evolve with the industry that will still be around as SEO doesn’t ‘die’ but instead grows into something that is very much different to ‘classic’ SEO that we knew – something even more difficult to manipulate and based even more on giving internet users what they want.

It’s no longer SEO but maybe IMO – Inbound Marketing Optimisation.