Why SEO Doesn’t Matter Anymore and What You Should Do Instead

Search engine optimization used to be the holy grail of getting more traffic. Placing high in search engine rankings for prime keywords related to your niche could send thousands of visitors to your site on a regular basis. But more and more, search engine traffic isn’t as important to most websites. They’re finding their traffic from other places.

What do you think is the reason for this? Here in this post we trying to explain why search engine optimization doesn’t matter anymore and what are the alternatives for getting more and more traffic.

7 Reasons SEO Doesn’t Matter Anymore

Social media is a big part of the blame for this situation. People can now ask their friends or complete strangers for recommendations on virtually anything, and get human-filtered results within minutes through Facebook, Twitter, or other social networking sites. Internet users are also becoming more savvy and can cut through search results to find the best content, regardless of optimal placement for the best keywords.

Even in cases where search engines still send significant traffic to a site, search engines are becoming so much more intelligent that it’s getting harder and harder to get good placement unless you’re providing the best content.
Read on fore more information about what’s making search engine optimization less important, what you should do about it, and even when it still is important.

1. Facebook

More often than not, people aren’t using search engines to discover new content online. Instead, they’re turning to their friends. And with its new “Like” button appearing all over the web, Facebook is becoming an ever-more-important source of finding content online.

Rather than using Google or Yahoo! to find information on a topic, users are asking their Facebook friends and groups about whatever information they need. People also trust this information more, as it’s coming from people they know, rather than just being returned in what often seems like a random pattern.

According to a latest research it’s been indicated that Facebook has currently More than 500 Million active users. If Facebook were a physical nation than this would make them the third most populous country in the world, after China and India.

Getting Your Money's Worth: SEO and Your Digital Assets

Reference: http://searchenginewatch.com/

Whether you're dealing with double-digit gains or losses, getting efficiency and maximum value from every part of your site and your brand's assets only makes good sense.

Frequent readers might remember my article last year about my adoration of Billy Mays, the TV gadget pitchman extraordinaire with the blue shirt, thick beard, and booming voice who met an untimely end.


Behind this guilty pleasure lies a begrudging admiration for not just what he accomplished, but for the $19.99 gadgets that he peddled. They do everything! They serve 50 different functions (none of which you'll need more than once). At an extremely cheap price, remember: buying an elephant on a one-dollar sale only makes sense if you need an elephant. With a money-back guarantee (which, for under $20, you'll never bother with)!
Yes, the products are laughable, but they sell because you feel you're getting your money's worth. And, of course, because Billy was awesome.

So ask yourself: Are you getting your money's worth from your site? 

For much of the answer, you'll immediately think of the big, common pieces of the site, like your page templates and checkout procedures. You forked out good money for these features and want to see them earn it back in spades.

The same mindset also applies to pieces of your site that are much easier to forget, and those that you might not realize could be optimized for more search value. These are elements that make up your Web site that took just as much time and money to develop: your digital assets.

Getting Video SEO Right By Benjamin Wayne

Refeerence: http://searchenginewatch.com/

Videos, properly submitted, are 53 times more likely to generate a first page Google ranking than traditional SEO techniques, according to a recent study by Forrester Research. However, many companies are ignoring video SEO altogether, only submitting the pages on which videos reside and not the videos themselves, or worst of all, submitting their video assets to YouTube under the misunderstanding that this will generate SEO benefits.

Video SEO Advantages

• Video SEO is 53 times more likely to produce a first-page search result than traditional techniques.
• Google is pushing video to the top of search results, creating a goldmine for marketers.
• Results begin to appear in days, and some publishers succeed in getting 25 percent or more of their videos to produce first page results.
• Search engines can't find video content on their own, so getting submission right is critical -- a knowledgeable partner can make this much easier.

The Unfair Advantages of Video SEO
Although video SEO isn't dissimilar to traditional SEO, it has two distinct advantages.
First, Google and other search engines work to have a mix of content types displayed in search results (a.k.a., blended search results). For this reason, they give a higher ranking to video content than other forms of Web content in order to make sure that searches consistently display mixed search results.
Second, there's a relative dearth of video content available today, and only a small fraction of the content available is properly submitted to search engines for inclusion in the search indexes. This combination of disproportionate bias towards video content and the small pool of indexed video content available is a gold mine for publishers.

Getting Video Content into the Search Engines and Getting it Right

Link Building for Bing Rankings: Dos and Don'ts By Chris Crum

 Reference: http://www.webpronews.com/

It's easy for businesses to get caught up in Google's expectations for their sites, when trying to market through search. That's certainly a wise thing to do, considering Google dominates the search market by a huge margin. Still, there are other search engines that people are using, and it is also wise to make sure your site is performing to the best of its ability in those too.

I'm obviously talking about Yahoo and Bing, but Yahoo's share is declining, while Bing's is gaining. Furthermore, if the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo goes through, Bing search will be talking over Yahoo anyway.

Do you take Bing into account when optimizing your site? Comment here.

We don't hear as much about what Bing wants out of a site for rankings, but Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center has shared some dos and don'ts of link-building for Bing. Not surprisingly, a lot of his advice for honoring Bing's policy, does not differ too much from advice that Google would give you. It is, however, still always nice to see how they feel, just to clear up any possible confusion.

Like Google, Bing places great emphasis on quality links to determine its rankings. "Just don't make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution," says DeJarnette. "You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time."

Article Marketing 101 By Ron Jones

Reference: http://searchenginewatch.com/

Article marketing is a good tool for reaching out to a broader audience and letting them know about your expertise on a given topic. The purpose is to establish credibility and drive traffic back to your Web site. So let's first cover the basics of article marketing and submission, and then touch on potential duplicate content issues.
What is Article Marketing?
Article marketing allows writers to promote themselves and their company by writing articles and making the content freely available for reproduction on other Internet sites. Basically, you're providing something of value for free to those who have similar interests or work in your field.

Top International Search Marketing Failures to Avoid in 2010 By Michael Bonfils

Reference: http://searchenginewatch.com/

As we begin a new decade, our best chance for success in 2010 is to look back over the failures of our past in order to succeed with our programs in the future. Samuel Smiles once wrote, "We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery."
Although it's nearly impossible to list all the failures I've seen over the last 15 years since our beloved industry emerged, I've seen five big ones. We'll look at two today, and three more in our next installment.

Failure 1: Misguided Research
I'm almost embarrassed to admit that, like many, I've often dreamed of selling something for a dollar profit to every Chinese and Indian citizen, but I would never base population as a target market strategy. Although it isn't entirely impossible, there are many things to consider when researching your markets.
It all starts with your primary objective. Branding a product, versus selling a product, versus obtaining a lead for your product would almost all have different strategies.

Google Ditches Local Listings for SEOs and Designers - By Chris Crum

Reference: http://www.webpronews.com/

As 2009 came to a close, Google managed to get SEOs riled up for one last controversial topic. For some time, SEOs and web designers have been noticing that Google has not been showing local listings in search results for queries related to their businesses - even location-specific ones.

Should SEOs and designers be worried about local listings?

As Matt McGee mentions in a Search Engine Land piece, even a query like "candy" without any geographical indicator will bring up a seven-pack of local results, but a query for "seo" or "web design" or even something as specific as "web design vancouver" will bring up no local listings whatsoever (although the organic results still heavily favor local businesses in location-specific queries).

 

Needless to say, some SEOs and designers are taking this as something of a slap in the face, justified or not. Search engine optimization and web design are both services after all, and just about every other type of service you can think of will yield local listings in a Google search.

CSS Vs. Tables @ Decloak.com

reference: http://www.decloak.com/

Fully integrated CSS benefits are challenged on their practicality and real-life usefulness
fully integrated means replacing all table tags with div tags
a.k.a. CSS-P or css tables

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE:
The terms, CSS and CSS-P (or full css) are two (2) very
different things in this article. The term "CSS" is more of the regular CSS used for font styles and the like. The term, "CSS-P", is specifically referring to use of div tags to replace table tags. This article challenges CSS-P, not CSS.


Are they any benefits to using a fully CSS integrated solution (css tables or CSS-P)?
No. There is no "real-life" or practical benefits when you start to replace each-and-every-single table tag with DIV tags and attempt to use full CSS to display your webpages properly across popular browsers.

20 Essential Blog Directories to Submit Your Blog To By Loren Baker

Reference: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/

Gaining exposure for your blog is critical to building a following, readership, and revenue. Besides the basic SEO steps of adding compelling and keyword friendly titles, URL structure and descriptions (along with the basic Wordpress SEO plugins) basic link building for blogs begins with listing them in blog directories.

Personally, I love launching a new blog, or adding one to an existing site, and watching the high valued links roll in. And as we know, BLOG = Better Listings On Google.

There are many paths to consider when building links to your site or blog such as link baiting or blogroll link swapping, but few are as easy to implement and cost effective as submitting to blog directories – and good link juice is essential to a healthy growing blog.

Let us take a look at 20 popular directories worthy of your consideration.

1. Best of the Web Blog Search La Crem de la Crem, Best of the Web’s Blog Directory is very selective and only lists aged and valuable blogs. A link from here is majestic and well deserved.

2. Bloggeries has the best categories and subcategories home page on the internet. The layout is clear and concise, and readers are able to find what they are looking for in a snap!

8 Reasons You Need to Stop Ignoring Twitter - By Chris Crum @Webpronews

Reference: http://www.webpronews.com/

There have been many articles written about why to use Twitter, and we've certainly published our fair share of them. However, the landscape is constantly changing. New trends, ideas, applications, and features come out, and they further emphasize Twitter's place in said landscape. Following are some reasons why it is becoming increasingly important to marketers.

1. Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists are changing the game. We recently looked at several reasons why, but also consider that with the Lists gadget, your tweets may appear all over the web if you can get onto lists. They will appear on sites and blogs, which are more than likely going to be related to the niche you are in anyway if you have the right audience on Twitter.

2. The Openness of Twitter

The openness of Twitter, social media and the web in general, pretty much means that your messages on Twitter won't be limited to your Twitter audience. Facebook and other social networks will bring tweets in. People will share them, screenshot them, link to them on blogs, etc. Twitter is a means of getting your message out to more people, but it's not necessarily only the people on Twitter that will see those messages.

3. Building Valuable Relationships

Laura Fitton, the author of Twitter for Dummies, chalks up success on Twitter to four basic concepts: listen, learn, care, and serve. Basically, if you listen to the community, you will learn, and if you show that you care, you are more likely to get more out of your efforts. Serving means providing something of use to the community.

Handling Legitimate Cross-domain Content Duplication @ Google Webmaster Central

We've recently discussed several ways of handling duplicate content on a single website; today we'll look at ways of handling similar duplication across different websites, across different domains. For some sites, there are legitimate reasons to duplicate content across different websites — for instance, to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. To help with issues that arise on such sites, we're announcing our support of the cross-domain rel="canonical" link element.

Ways of handling cross-domain content duplication:

Choose your preferred domain
When confronted with duplicate content, search engines will generally take one version and filter the others out. This can also happen when multiple domain names are involved, so while search engines are generally pretty good at choosing something reasonable, many webmasters prefer to make that decision themselves.

Reduce in-site duplication
Before starting on cross-site duplicate content questions, make sure to handle duplication within your site first.

Enable crawling and use 301 (permanent) redirects where possible
Where possible, the most important step is often to use appropriate 301 redirects. These redirects send visitors and search engine crawlers to your preferred domain and make it very clear which URL should be indexed. This is generally the preferred method as it gives clear guidance to everyone who accesses the content. Keep in mind that in order for search engine crawlers to discover these redirects, none of the URLs in the redirect chain can be disallowed via a robots.txt file. Don't forget to handle your www / non-www preference with appropriate redirects and in Webmaster Tools.

What Google's Real-Time Search Means to SEO, PPC & Reputation Management - By Chris Crum

Reference: http://www.webpronews.com/

It seems that over the course of the entire year, we've been waiting for Google to get real-time search. Now it's here. If you have ever had a hard time finding a direct relationship between social media and search engine marketing, it doesn't get any more direct than this. Real-time search results (from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other sources) right in regular SERPs.

While "real-time search" has certainly been a buzzword this year, the concept itself has been around for a while longer in some capacity. Sure, the concept of searching Twitter has been around for quite some time now, but even as far as Google is concerned, freshness has been a factor of great interest.

"Google has been working on real-time search for years," as Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb points out. "In the spring of 2006, the story goes, Google launched Google Finance onto the Web and was promptly dismayed to find that the service didn't appear in a Google search for its own name later that day. It was after that, and a few other similar experiences, that Google engineers created an algorithm called QDF, or Query Deserves Freshness. QDF determines when results for a query need to be augmented with the newest content available, in addition to the content with the highest PageRank."

Things to Consider if Page Speed is to Become a Ranking Factor By Chris Crum

Reference: http://www.webpronews.com/

About a month ago, WebProNews interviewed Google's Matt Cutts, who suggested that page speed may soon become a ranking factor in the world's most popular search engine. Speed has been a consistent theme with the company over the past year or so, with the release of various tools and announcements. It has become quite evident that Google places a great deal of importance on speeding up the web. With that in mind, it's not hard to see why Cutts' suggestion could soon become a reality. Google has always maintained that it is trying to deliver the best user experience, and by delivering results that load quickly users should get just that.

While many webmasters are embracing the notion of speed as a ranking factor as a welcome change, there are also plenty of people who do take issue with it for a variety of reasons. We've had some interesting comments from readers on the subject. Here are some of them:

So, we all have to pay for the most expensive hosting now or we won’t get found in search engines. I won’t be able to host on my own servers at work now. It went from paying for backlinks with huge advertising corporations to get sites PageRank up, Now we have to go with even bigger corporations that can afford to have a massive pipe connecting to the Internet. I don’t think Google mean to, but they are squeesing the poor people of the World out from search results and glorifying huge corporations – Be careful Google!

Firefox SEO Toolbar Plug-ins - By Addme

Every AddMe newsletter is a must read, this issue is not exception; a 3 part series about SEO tools, resources and browser plug-ins. This article talks about some of the more popular Firefox SEO plug-ins.
Search engine optimization is a cost effective form of website promotion, often best outsourced to the professionals as they have access to the latest tools, resources and not to mention years of experience.

This newsletter opens up the world of SEO, and sheds some light on what the SEO companies use to help optimize your website.

One of the main tools used in the search optimization industry is the web browser, how else are you to analyze reports, view webpages and delve deep into search engine results.

Firefox is quickly becoming one of the most popular web browsers, slowly overtaking internet explorer which for me is a welcome change.