While the "is SEO dead" debate may seem recent to you, this isn't a new discussion at all. You can easily find articles with this exact same title from several years ago. And what have changed since then? Probably nothing significant, simply things have been taking its course.

IS SEO REALLY DEAD?

It's not easy to answer this question mainly because there is no consensus on what SEO means exactly. However there are two clear types of SEO services that are living hard times:

• Rankings-based SEO: This is the Wikipedia definition of SEO:

  Search engine optimization is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings.

  Sticking to this definition, SEO can also be referred as "search engine positioning" (SEP), as it tries to get your web site to the top listings in search engines for certain keywords. According to this approach SEOs (search engine optimizers) are failing, because it is harder than ever to achieve top rankings. This is caused by two main reasons:

  • The increasing volume of web sites online, which intensifies the competition.

  • The constant efforts of search engines to improve their rankings and make them less manipulable.

  This picture won't change over the time. On the contrary, as time goes by, the competence will be strengthened and top rankings will be even more unreachable.

• Black Hat SEO: In the aim of getting higher search rankings, Black Hat optimizers use techniques that are frowned upon by search engines (and that are often unethical): invisible text, keyword stuffing, forum and blog spam... While you might benefit temporarily from those techniques, they aren't worth the risk: sooner or later your web site will be penalized or even removed from major search engines.

THE THIN LINE BETWEEN GOOD SEO AND USABILITY

Leaving apart wrong approaches and penalized methods there are still a number of aspects that SEO can improve to make your web site more appealing to search engines, through "White Hat" techniques. However you will come to the conclusion that these techniques are not exclusive to SEO.

• By making your internal pages be three links or less away from your front page and making their urls static (without data following a question mark "?" in them) you will improve the search engine indexability of your site. This is, without a doubt, a determinant factor. No SEO technique will work unless the pages of your web site are indexed by search engines. But by doing this you will also improve the user experience: your web pages will be accessed easier and faster, and their urls will be more human-readable.

• By making light pages with clean HTML code, external CSS files... you will avoid potential indexation problems (search engines might not fully index big files), but you will also allow users to download your web site faster.

• By adding meaningful information to page titles, meta tags, links, image alternate texts... you will increase the search engine relevance of your pages, but you will also help users orientate themselves thanks to a more descriptive and understandable web site.

• By using structural elements on your pages (headings, lists, bold text...) you will assist search engines to make sense of your web site and assign more importance to significant information, but you will also help people skim your content and easily find what they are looking for.

Read above: easier, faster, more understandable... usability concepts. Good SEO and usability come hand in hand in order to achieve a global Internet marketing success. SEO companies that focus exclusively on search engine rankings are doomed to failure because they don't think long-term. On the contrary, White Hat SEO put forth best efforts to develop a web site that is appealing to search engines, but also to users, and this is the only way to ensure your web site's ongoing success.

According to this, search engine optimization is not dead, but it needs a different approach: SEO can't stand as an independent aspect of your web site, it must be considered an integral part of your global marketing strategy.