Today's post is a continuation of the monumentally lengthy rant which I began last week with:
Google Inadvertently Announces the Death of SEO and the Future of SEO in the Same PostThis will be the second of a minimum three part installment over the next amount of time I choose at my leisure. This reflects something I have desperately been wanting to say for a long time now.
A special Thanks ---
again -- from his biggest fan, to a true online marketing icon,
Aaron Wall, for his mention of the Guru in this article
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Too many
people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem to be more
afraid of life than death.
James F. Bymes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_F._Byrnes********************************************************************
Question for the
Week of September 25th, 2008The post by Bob Mass(a?) made me wonder what kind of opportunities he's hinting at.
This was a question posed by a reader of this thread:
http://www.seobook.com/seo-news-interesting-links and while I'm not going to get into the specifics of exactly what I'm hinting at, (you can find more info on that by reading the thread and my next installment --- blatant plug for getting my RSS feed), I am going to layout the groundwork for a LOT of opportunities coming with the death of SEO. All right, let's get on with it!
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The Fear of Death
As humans
beings, we all fear death to one extent or another. Faith is tested in all men
as we face the unknown. But fear it as
we may, death comes. It’s a reality that we all have the choice to accept or to
deny but either choice you make, you’re still going to have to deal with it one
day.
The cycle of
life is inevitable and except for that fear thing, it’s not that bad. Such is
the case with SEO.
Like it or
not, we are all witnessing the metamorphosis of an industry that for that last
decade +, we have all pretty much resigned ourselves to calling SEO. We have
called it that for the lack of a better term to describe a complicated,
multi-faceted process of generating targeted traffic from the organic results
of major search engines.
It has been
argued that the term SEO also includes things like market research, metrics
analysis, copywriting, PPC marketing, split testing of ads, and a host of other
processes that require a wide range of skills sets and no small degree of
business management acumen. Hence new terms being offered from time to time in
an attempt to better describe actions that are related, but detached, from the
rather unsophisticated processes of attempting to manipulate search engine
algorithms to give oneself a competitive advantage by virtue of a popular
misconception that organic SEO is free. (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Sorry for the outburst but that one always makes me laugh!)
But rarely
has that term been used to reflect the process of converting that traffic into
bank deposits.
SEO Does Not = Bank Deposits
With little
more than a glance at many of the more popular SEO hang outs, I believe it is
obvious even to the uninitiated, SEO is pretty much focused on traffic
generation. Things like conversions, demographics, analytics and increased website
revenue generation from upselling take a distant back seat. Were it not so,
topics like social media manipulation for the primary purpose of link
acquisition and when PR will be updated would not dominate the interactive real
estate to the extent that it does.
In this guru’s opinion, too many opportunities
for genuine marketing discussions get reduced to yet one more twittershitter to
be dug up and stumbled upon.
Serious
discussion about honest to goodness marketing often gets buried by linkbaiting
headlines that offer little more than a boost to the ego of the master baiter.
Why? Because generating traffic is easy. Making money, online or off, takes
education, dedication, focus, and even with those assets in place, it does
little more than give one the ability to be right more often than wrong.
Free Doughnuts
At any
retail outlet, offline or on, generating traffic takes little more than giving
away a free doughnut. The trick now becomes talking the overweight, shirt
pocket full of cigarettes, sugar crusty lipped, two doughnut sneaking while
avoiding looking you in the eye, tire kicker into becoming a loyal customer and
actually paying you something to offset the cost of the time it took to run to
the doughnut store.
Far too many
in the online marketing community,(not me or you of course. I mean those “other”
guys), cling to the term SEO simply because it is vague and non-descriptive.
This offers a hiding place for those not willing to put forth the effort to
accept that it is NOT about search engine placement or even about search
engines. It is about making money.
It doesn’t
take a lot of intellectual investment to learn to cloak, put 18 keywords in a
65 character title, spam splogs, spam twitter with the most banal conversation
since the birth of human interaction and then brag about being #5 for a search
with 5 million results. LOSER!
Learn to do
those things AND convert at 4% or above and you will not be able to argue the
point any longer. You will quickly admit that yes, organic search traffic
generation is easy. It is the converting that is the hard part.
So, if we could accept that MAYBE I'm even a little bit right, where does that leave SEO?
It leaves it finally being able to shed itself of the unsavory, baggage laden misnomer. It finally eliminates the need for the circular debates over hat color. And it finally opens the door to the true value of online marketing as a professional industry ready to grab it's fair share of the 50 BILLION+ dollar online advertising market that is still in it's infancy. Sounds exciting huh?
It offers incredible opportunities for niches that the business world is just now starting to recognize. It brings about a new understanding of terms like spam, content, trust and just what true marketing really is. That is a paradigm shift.
It's time for an SEO funeral but that is NOT a cause for despair or mourning. It is a time for jubilant celebration at the birth of a new online marketing service industry ---- but only for those who see it.
In my next installment, I'm going to show you how you can prosper from the death of seo without having to learn, read or do anything different than you are doing right now other than how you present the outcome of your efforts.
PEACH Y'ALL
G
Boy! go turn that TV to channel 6. Gunsmoke is comin on