NewRedBook – The Nick Garner Blog

SEO is in trouble

I was asked about an SEO company who was bullying one of my friends in the social media space and this was my response (partially edited) :

What a load of !*!^£*$£!!!!. They are just trying to make you feel insecure.

The most important part of SEO is linkbuilding and the main thing agencies fall over on is link building. So that’s why they are very vague on this. So they talk about top rankings, but how are they going to do this? What is their link building plan what sort of sites will they get links from and how much resource will that take. So often they hide behind jargon so they can cover up their incapabilities when it comes to getting the kind of links you will need to rank and not get done for spamming.

And companies like this are going to be in trouble when potential clients sort out their basic SEO and when google finds a better way to rank sites using other then links

Ultimately SEO as we know it is dying. Shoemoney wrote on this and got it basically right,( IMO) he does not cover the incompetence of web developers who ignore SEO 101 stuff. For as long as they carry on, there will always be some fixing to do.
http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/05/07/seo-has-no-future/

This is why I’m spending about ½ of my effort on social… because ultimately google cares only about revenue… and what their users want. So you will see a bigger and bigger split between commercial and informational listings and for prominence on commercial listings, you will have to pay $$$

To me social is powerful because it where those conversations happen that help decide on one course of action or another – in other words, it’s a continuum of a process that has carried on for 1000’s of years. Sadly it was disrupted in the 20th C by broadcast media, but now it returning to its normal state. i.e. the power of individuals sharing information is coming back.

So in conclusion… read seomoz, seobook and webmasterworld and put yourself out as an seo’er since you are far better equipped to handle the link (relationship) building that Google care so much about when they decide on the value of a site