This is my response to this post: http://www.sitepoint.com/seo-is-dead/ comments are moderated so my response has to be approved to show up to the public. You can see my response below:
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Ok, I will be the first SEO professional to fall for this.
I would argue that SEO is not dying, rather social media is becoming more of a factor in an overall SEO strategy. It is important to not think of social media and SEO as being mutually exclusive.
SEO is the overall practice of optimizing websites to improve performance in search engines to help reach (or surpass) business goals and objectives. Social media is now just playing more of a role in search engine algorithms than it did before.
To your point on “Traditional SEO”: If you are referring to keyword stuffing, yes that has been long dead. The fact is, using clean, proper well-formed semantic markup (code) is always important as a good foundation for not only SEO, but performance, usability and good web design in general. The fundamentals of on-page SEO ensure a page is coded correctly to not inhibit search engines from finding the content on the page. These types of practices will never go away, but has become more of a standard of how to create good websites.
SEO is an evolving practice that is constantly changing and adapting to algorithm changes and new technologies. To claim SEO is dead is like saying PR was dead after email and the internet were introduced. The PR industry has adapted and evolved much like SEO will.
SEO will always play a part in an overall marketing strategy and will never die as long as people are searching for information and businesses are competing to show up first in the results.
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