[wynne jones]

I'd better check Garry, hope it's not something we're doing. If it is we will stop at pos 2. 

[peter maybury]

I have stopped advertising in yelow pages have stopped doing leaflet drops and all of my marketing effort apart from approaching the  customers that I really want to do business with, goes into web marketing. Internet business is the largest growth area by far. If you think s.e.o. is dead then you are a clown. As generatiosn move on our customers are being relaced by people who have been born in the computer generation. My kids spend hours browsing the web from their mobiles. I am 50 and my first introduction into computers was an amstrad pcw9512 when I was 25. I was one of the first to get into data bases and mail shotting customers and my business advanced quickly.  The internet is just another marketing tool but one which is changing the way that everone does business, ignore it at your peril.
I have 100,s of pages of information on the internet and many people that call us have already done their reseach and have chosen us.
You need to give people the access to enough information to make their decision, a lot of our younger customers have not even been spoken to until our arrival. It may be a way of doing business that you cannot comprehend but it is big business and you change of get passed by.

Peter
www.carpetcleanercardiff.com

[Steve Barnett (Carpet Care Plus)]

Well said Pete.

"SEO is dead" - got to be the stupidest thing I have ever read on this forum.

[Matt Seymour]

I have to say I am baffled by the suggestion that SEO is dead or that the internet isn't worth the time and effort.

The vast majority of people use the internet to search for service providers in this day and age. Even OAPs are being dragged into the 21st century now. You only have to look at the diminishing size of the Yellow Pages for evidence that other forms of advertising are on the slide. Give it a few more years and it will start to resemble a pamphlet just like Thompson does!

[wynne jones]

Maybe Ian was talking about how SEO is changing (which it has always done) not seo itself.

There are big changes coming and this will mean some of the sites people have will drop off the face of the earth. It will be no good simply having a site with a domain name the same as your main keyword. It won't be enough to build a site and then forget about it and  expect it to rank.

 

[Doug Holloway]

Hi Guys

Ian does indeed mean that SEO, swapping links and all that are dead and I tend to agree.

What are the big changes you predict Wynne?

Cheers

Doug

[Carpet Dawg]

Backlinks not getting indexed (or not as easy as it used to be) is one big change already in place.
RSS feeds, pinging and social bookmarking backlinks just doesn't cut the mustard anymore. The G can be annoying at times! I'm sure its a woman lol

[JandS]

So if these SEO people are all pretty good then.....................
When I type in "search engine optimisation companies Leeds"
in effect all the companies should come up in joint 1st place.
What happens if they get 2 companies doing the same thing
a couple of miles apart from each other and they both approach
the same SEO firm and say get me the top spot.
Who do they optimise to numero uno?
If they do their job to the best of their ability then both firms will
optimised the same so who gets it?

John

[Carpet Dawg]

So if these SEO people are all pretty good then.....................
When I type in "search engine optimisation companies Leeds"
in effect all the companies should come up in joint 1st place.
What happens if they get 2 companies doing the same thing
a couple of miles apart from each other and they both approach
the same SEO firm and say get me the top spot.
Who do they optimise to numero uno?
If they do their job to the best of their ability then both firms will
optimised the same so who gets it?

John

Simple John, Some so called seo experts talk pooe No one should garantee you number one spot. Too many varibles. It can be done though given the right circumstances, time, dedication and knowledge of course.

[garry22]

So if these SEO people are all pretty good then.....................
When I type in "search engine optimisation companies Leeds"
in effect all the companies should come up in joint 1st place.
What happens if they get 2 companies doing the same thing
a couple of miles apart from each other and they both approach
the same SEO firm and say get me the top spot.
Who do they optimise to numero uno?
If they do their job to the best of their ability then both firms will
optimised the same so who gets it?

It could not really ever happen.

1/ It would be a pretty dumb SEO firm that takes on two clients in the same niche in the same area.

2/ Even if the websites were identical in layout, content and age, the backlinks would almost certainly be different (or indexed at different times).

3/ Search engines may place different emphasis on where those links came from. This could vary from day to day let alone week to week. Nothing is static.

All this stuff about on site "optimising" and keyword density nonsense is not half as important as it was (keyword "density" has been irrelevant for a long time anyway).

I think where Ian does have a point is the social aspect (the "third arm") where visitor comments and general "web chat" will be given greater emphasis. Maybe that is what he meant above?

[wynne jones]

Doug

A couple of things that I heard (all speculation of course)

Downgrading the weighting given to domain name keywords.

More weighting to consistent addition of relevant content - additional pages.

Therefore if someone buys a static website and it has no easy mechanism to add content, like a blog or feed then will lose over the long term. This can happen now but not to same degree.

re seo firms

Most good seo firms are picky who they work with and many find the client rather than having a website or advertising their wears. You sort of want to 'back the right horse' because you would pick one vertical market in an area and just work with them. Quite often companies are going after different keywords but usually it would be a conflict of interests.

[happy mondays]

A few years ago geting 1st place on google was quite easy, a website owner just needed to submit their site on the various search engines they wanted it to appear on. The search engine would then send a spider to crawl the website and would store its cache so it would be checked and ranked, this was done on meta tags. If you had good keyword content and more than your rival, your site would appear higher than them.

Search engines had to combat this flaw... so started checking more points in their algorithms to ensure websites were truly relevant  meta tags, domain names, header tags, bold text, keyword weight & prominence, alt tags, file names, link anchor txt... Wynne has made a very valid point in his last post, I am no seo expert but... dont optimize for your domain name 

Seo is not dead and never will be