Is SEO Dying ?

State of Washington sues Web/SEO firm, http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/35218

SEO is a one part of SEM.

I have a great web designer. I have also an seo guy. He has brought my site up to where it is in a very short time. Web designers normally don't know a lot about seo. While it might be dying, there are a lot of things you can do to optimize the internals of your site as well as link building.

In my opinion if your web designer can't write valid, optimized markup to begin with then they aren't a "great" web designer at all. Web design is far more than just making something look pretty in Photoshop and slicing it up. Designing for the web involves the entire process, and good designers should have no problem living up to that.

Seos charge a fortune normally. They don't always get the results that there high price tag demands!

That's because they try to guarantee too many things that aren't completely under their control.

Exactly I couldn't agree more. A specific SEO person is creating his own niche in my opinion by telling you what has already been done wasn't good enough. In general I find when I am offered SEO as a function what they really mean is they will provide a link building service which often turns out to be fully automated based on the information you provide.

for example one guy offered to submit articles to hundreds of sites for my but I had to provide all the copy first. If I had enough copy for hundreds of submissions I'd be happy myself not to bother using the service but all he was really going to do was create a lot of duplicate content on an already cluttered internet, I just don't see the point. Alright maybe I'd get a lot of backlinks but at what cost to users. A lot of more of the same so I didn't bother, I'll continue posting myself and building my links at my speed, even if I do get distracted by reading forums most of the time.

Paul

I have to say I don't agree with this article at all.

People will always need SEO to give them a boost over competitors on or off page. There are a lot of great tools such as wordpress that will help you create an seo friendly site quickly and easily but as soon as too many people use wordpress, someone will come up with something that will give them an advantage.

The SEO principles we adopt today may die within 3 years as search engine filtering adapts and relevant/quality content recognition is improved but there will be new SEO principles to adopt at that time. SEO will remain as long as you can adapt quickly to stay ahead of the game.

Interesting so then what's the whole Search Engine aka google going to use?

- Todd Charske

SEO is anything and everything that can bring is free traffic (mostly search engine traffic, but high quality partnerships may fall into the same category as well). SEO is not just adding Meta Tags, so I don't SEO is going anywhere.

"High quality partnerships" have nothing to do with search engine optimization. SEO is simply intended to improve rankings in search engines. Period.

If SEO is dead then why clients are paying upto $50/click for high ranking keywords to Google PPC ( Pay per click) ??

SEO's work their way around to reduce the costs incurred by paid advertisement on Google which can cost around 3-4 thousand dollars/month. SEO's charge 1/3 or 1/4 of the cost in order to leverage benefits out of natural rankings.

SEO can never be dead since search engines have become integral part of our daily lives.

There are certain businesses like 'pizza, restaurants etc" which do not generate much traffic from SEO users. Therefore these businesses do not indulge in SEO activities.

However in businesses like software, marketing, legal services, travel, and finance SEO has become an integral part of marketing efforts.

SEO is surely becoming difficult for newcomers, but we cannot say that SEO is dead.

If SEO is dead then first Google/Yahoo has to be dead.

Just imagine how many times you log into Google/Yahoo on every single day ? You will get your answer

You're missing the point of the article, saxena. It talks about how the SEO industry as a separate service could be dying off in yield to more integral SEO techniques in the core development of websites.

Nobody's saying that optimizing sites for search engines is unimportant. The article describes a trend in the industry away from 3rd party SEO services and keeping the optimization in-house.

If SEO is important then this industry will also become important as a separate industry.

However, it has become difficult to optimize websites especially new websites for Google. This is the reason why people sometimes get disappointed with the results.

Multinational Companies cannot afford to pay $50-$100/click for high ranking keywords. Click Fraud and Adwords Click Fraud has triggered several issues which can only be controlled through natural SEO.

Google is trying hard to ward-off those tracking it 24/7, and is trying to maximize its profits by "forcing" users to rely on their paid marketing mechanisms.

There are several thousand companies spending thousands of dollars each month on their PPC campaigns.

Moreover, the cost of hiring in-house staff could be several times higher than sending the same project to a 3rd party service provider specializing in SEO.

There are several issues which can consume a considerable amount of time. Any company which decides to hire an SEO manager can cost around $50,000-$75,000/Year. However this same project can be handled effectively by a 3rd party service provider at 1/3 or 1/4th of the cost.

It is more about costs + profits and the final results which will decide the future of SEO industry.

One should never pay for SEO, as graphixboy says most of it is done by your developer or you when creating the site.

If you write with people in mind and believe in what you write then your audience will find you, this I have foiund to be true anyway

Happy-Hunting