Is SEO a Honorable Marketing Effort?
Article Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/2012/07/20/the-death-of-seo-the-rise-of-social-pr-and-real-content/
The term “SEO” or Search Engine Optimization was mentioned in lecture prior to discussion of auctions for advertising on mediums such as Google and Facebook. This reminded me of my experiences at a couple of internship positions that I have held in the past. The first time that I heard of SEO was several summers ago, and right off the bat the whole idea seemed very flimsy. The idea of SEO also again came up a lot while I worked with several startup companies this past summer. Nonetheless, I was never able to find the true value in that form of marketing for several reasons. It seemed like the companies that were really having trouble finding relevance on the internet were continually “starting massive SEO campaigns.” I began to see that the ideas that were not holding up and could not find a sufficient user base had to take the extra effort of either thinking of SEO methods or bringing in an outside SEO consultant. This helped to maintain my belief in the flimsiness of SEO practices. It seemed like it would make a lot more sense that standard marketing methods, along with a truly quality product, would not require any form of optimization in search results. That is why I wanted to understand more about the industry by doing some research.
Looking at the most recent, popular articles and studies about SEO, it seemed like most search results pointed to the benefits of SEO and tips that could help your company. Many of these types of posts came from blogs and sites specifically tailored to the SEO industry. I wanted to find an article that would not have that sort of bias and was able to make a logical critique of the SEO industry. That is when I stumbled upon Ken Krogue’s famous piece in Forbes.
To make a quick summary of Krogue’s argument: He is arguing that the SEO industry is dying because engines like Google are beginning to understand the greater difference between “white hat” and “black hat” SEO methods, as well as finding new ways to trump the efforts of SEO consultants by looking towards social media for validity of a company or product. “White hat” describes subtle SEO methods that a not radically different from traditional marketing techniques used to increase successful products’ online profiles. On the other hand, a “black hat” technique is described by Krogue as the “obvious villainous practice of gaming the system by doing things to raise rankings that Google doesn’t want.” The basis of the article’s argument is a conversation with Adam Torkildson, an SEO guru, who realizes that there are efforts being made to trump the attempts of SEO consultants to artificially inflate online ratings.
The “Penguin Release” by Google was an algorithm that was released that decreased the relevance of companies using faulty SEO methods. The new algorithm weighed a greater importance on the social media presence of a company, rather than the amount of backlinks pointing to a website. This was done because faking the success or potential of a company is much harder on social media (which would require making fake profile to upvote or like relevant pages).
The article continued to argue that SEO is a faulty and unstable industry, and that “real social media community support, compelling PR, and real content” are the best ways for SEO consultants should conduct their marketing efforts.
The argument against the stability of the SEO industry is not exceptionally related to the content discussed in the Networks course. However, the mention of SEO in class sparked my interest in trying to gather a greater understanding of the legitimacy of the industry. To me, especially after reading and reviewing the Forbes article, the idea of optimizing a company’s results on the web seems like a devious way of promotion. I feel like the growth of SEO would only make the internet full of even more spam and malicious content. If a product is actually something interesting or important, people will find a way to find it with traditional marketing methods. The discussion of advertising auctions on Google and Facebook in class are much closely related to the real way that companies which are looking to generate a strong web presence should act. Paying for advertising and seeing if people are interested seems like a much more honorable way of marketing. Trying to sneak into search results in not.
I heard that an seo article must have more than 1000 words per page, is that true? need your response please…thanks