New Article - SEO Is More Important Than Ever

[thejenn]

Authored by: Ross Dunn

Full Text: http://www.searchengineguide.com/dun.../0817_rd1.html

A Snippet:

Lately I have noticed more and more writers stating that search engine optimization (SEO) is no longer as important for online success. This spin may make sense to those writers (and their financial goals) as they try to push industry cash flow away from SEO but I disagree wholeheartedly and throughout this posting I will explain why.

[caseyturton]

Like money, it's way ahead of whatever is in second place...

[infinitytech]

I agree with this article. SEO is important. SEO is just becoming more defined as the spiders keep improving.

[James Schramko]

SEO is vitally important. The benefits are too great to ignore.

Some of the people who knock SEO have not been good at it. Others are caught up in the latest fad - PPC, Membership sites, blogging etc.....

There are not many starving SEO's they are busy building prime real estate - online.

[Joseph]

Great article! Thanks.

[logicburst]

SEO is definitely essential but it's also very important to not neglect other areas of Internet marketing such as PPC, Social Media, Web Analysis and quality content creation. The combination of all web marketing tactics will be the deciding factor on how popular your site is.

[now-or-never]

I am a SEM proffesional and in my opinion SEo is a dying star and it is bound to fade in a couple of years...

No positive signals as the bot is becoming really un predictable...

[PressureProsInc]

I don't want to appear disrespectful or cynical but from what I have witnessed:

The companies that say SEO is dying or dead are usually not successful at it. The same goes for listing in DMOZ. Those that say its worthless are not listed there. I guess the true standpoint is that SEO is getting harder and harder and more expensive to achieve. That makes sense. On generic, high search keywords only the big players can rank.

The key is to find niche keywords and optimize for those. I find conversions better when you bring in this type of traffic (with, of course, the website content and flow done correctly). Remember that a person using Google types the keyword phrase they think is perfect for what they are seeking. Analyze secondary, less popular phrases for what you are selling and SEO is not dead.. its a gold mine.

Its still very achievable to get 500 unique visitors per day with a 3% conversion rate with nothing but SEO work on secondary keywords (thats what I call them). Again, SEO is not dead, the rules are changing.

[Fred333]

Seo i the future of the Web. They are the maintenance guys in a giant building. They keep everything running smoothly inside the web through optimization.

[RaptorRex]

I am beginning to believe that there are some types of sites/products for which optimization will not help get you a decent listing on Google (1st page). From what I read, anything other than first page is useless. Is that true?

The best google ranks I've ever had were #2 and #5. #2 brought me a couple thousand visitors a day, #5 (very limited audience) brought me around 30.

I have suspicions that auto listing in 1000 directories can give a long tail effect greater than traffic from a Google listing. That was the case of my #5 Google listing. It's what I'm calling the "Inbound Link Long Tail". I'm writing an article on that this weekend.

I think my point is: SEO is not for every site. For some sites, there are better alternatives.