Has Search Engine Optimization Rested in Peace Forever?

Is SEO dead? This is the burning question these days. The method that enjoyed its kingship once has now become a doubt! All thanks to the spammers and black hat SEO practitioners who thought that practicing like a sycophant by putting overly dense keywords and unnatural key phrases are enough to allure search engine bots. For sure, this trick worked but then Google proved it much smarter than those obsequious.

The white hat practitioners became scape goats as search engines would write algorithms for coming years which denigrate their sincere efforts. All in all, today, whether search engine optimization works is a million dollar question. Let’s try to find the truth based on our experiment and observation, experts’ views and what all our dear friend Matt Cutt says!

Many SEO experts announced their career telling “We are done with it as Google now works!” –which simply means the bot has become stricter than ever and the tricks to beat and manipulate SERPs does not work anymore. In the sweat of getting traffic from wherever it is possible, search engine optimization experts (so called?) started taking the SEO guidelines by Google lightly. This gamesmanship took them nowhere and finally their sites were penalized heavily. Not just individual’s site, but the robust algorithm took its toll on reputed sites, blogging platforms and even on knowledge-based portals. The black-hat practitioners could not understand the nuance between making site better and making ranking better and paid heavily for this result.

Today, SEO is not all beer and skittles –all those who actually know SEO know this! It takes a lot of efforts and money. Not only SEO experts have to tackle Panda that targets the sites with shallow or duplicate content but also Penguin that keeps his eyes red on overly optimized anchor texts. Whilst blindly submitting content on third party sites has a little value (due to unauthorized and tarnished image) today, genuine link building requires a lot of approvals that takes good amount of time and by this the content would be outdated.

Has it gone to dogs? No! It has gone to humans!

The fun is here –the human started thinking about search engines to rank better and on the other hand, the search engines started thinking about humans because they are the ultimate readers. Google and other search engine giants soon understood that it’s better to rank those pages higher that are recommended by their users themselves over the pages that are merely optimized with keywords/phrases but little make sense.

Social media not only proves what’s genuine and what’s not but also gives a fair hint of what is popular and what people want to see. Search engine bots soon had updated algorithms that included the weightage of social media. The things become viral if they are shared by hundreds of thousands of people on the internet –no matter whether the page is optimized with keywords.

SEO is not dead; it’s now uncommon and rare!

Great changes in algorithms gave rise to this doubt. SEO is not dead at all; it has just become more precious as it’s uncommon and rare. Manipulation does not work today and that is where most of the SEO practitioners fail. Either you adapt it or simply leave it. It’s simple as that. Making content more accessible, user-friendly and user-likeable is what works today. The art of SEO witnessed a great paradigm shift as today the SERPs list the pages that are loved and liked by humans and not merely by bots.