JIC Design Blog: SEO, Web Development and Technology

I just read a great article detailing how classic SEO is dead. Personally I agree and disagree with the statement. Classic SEO, involving on-page factors, crawling, as well as link campaigns are still highly relevant in search rankings, however they are not the end all and be all anymore. Search engines have integrated image search, news search, video search and even local listings in the SERPs. A good example is Yahoo Glue (http://in.search.yahoo.com/). Try it out and see what the SERPs look like. Are the results more useful or relevant that a page of links? Maybe.

However classic SEO is never going to be dead. SEO tactics are used to rank a website at the top of the SERPS. When would a client not want that to happen?

Why do I agree with the statement that SEO is dead. First off, local listings don’t necessarily require crawling. These listings can and sometimes are taken directly from local directories, and videos from sites like Youtube rank without being crawled in the old sense of crawling. The new web and ranking systems have pushed much trust on to end users with tagging, ratings, and bookmarking.

So, I believe that SEO is still alive and kicking for assisting in ranking sites in SERPs, however, there are many means to rank sites/pages without using classic SEO tactics, especially in high traffic social websites. Now as SEOs we must provide our clients with new and innovative strategies to overcome the end user’s change in behaviour.