SEO Will Remain Strong

Every few months a rumor starts that SEO is on the way out. It’s not. It will continue to grow and evolve; it certainly won’t stay the same; but as long as search engines are around, the need to optimize will be as well.

A high organic CTR still tells Google you’re a relevant and authoritative result for a given search query. Your click through rate is now being taken into account as Google moves towards user influenced results.

The time a visitor spends on your site is also impacting scores now. These organic / unpaid results visitors are drawn to your site through a variety of factors, but normally they click on you because of your SEO which landed you at the top of the SERPS. It is up to you to keep their attention, however. Your usability and navigation is important.

Social networking is joining the club, true, but it isn’t taking over the entire show. You still need your organic search results, and you still need SEO. Few and far between are the businesses who can live off of Twitter alone.

You need traffic from organic search. You need traffic from paid search. You need traffic from social sites, and you need traffic to STAY on your site when they visit. All of this means that SEO is not dead, but just needs to be tweaked a little to take into account the other things you need besides pure clicks – like conversions.

As SEO adapts, there are a few things that stay constant – the need for top notch content, and the need for top notch links. Until Google completely revamps their entire approach, SEO will continue to be the best way to get results.