I’m so tired of hearing some people say that SEO is dead. Maybe they are merely being provocative.
Perhaps they need to fill seats in their event, and so they come up with “bait” session titles like “Why SEO is fundamentally DEAD.”
While SEO is NOT dead, the way that you’re doing it might be. Does the following describe your approach?
You’ve optimized your H1s and meta tags and you’ve built a few (hopefully white hat) links.

SEO is dead

It’s human to want a again and again formula to achieve a goal. The bad news is that there is no precise formula to SEO anymore. Sure, there are best practices, and a skilled SEO practitioner can greatly increase the chances of a good outcome. But we live in a world that comes with no guarantees — especially where SEO is concerned.

So if we aren’t able to predict an outcome from our optimization efforts, do I agree with those pundits.

who say that SEO must be dead?

In a way, yes. SEO in the traditional sense is dead. Outsmarting the search engines will no longer be feasible for most. But SEO does still exist, just in an evolved form.
To understand what SEO is today, let’s look at how we got here.

shepherds in semantic search

A clue had come in the form of a Google demonstration of hands-free conversational search at Google I/O: the voice command.
It was thrilling to see we were one step closer to realizing a Star Trekkian future where we could speak to our machines using natural, everyday language, and they would not only understand us but also answer back.

Title tag with higher rankings is smaller than expected

In a recent study that analyzed one million Google search resunlts, that the correlation between a given keyword in the title tag and the ranking for the search with that keyword was much smaller than expected.

It is “entities”

What do I mean by “entities?” Let’s take an example. If you have an article on list building, it’s likely that the keyword “list building” would appear, but it is also likely that terms related to list building would also be present in the article, such as “subscribers” and “email.” These terms are relevant to our topic of list building, s0 it’s reasonable to expect them to be in our article.

Key takeaways

Winning at SEO today is not about figuring which buttons to push. Once you have done the technical due diligence to make your site Google-friendly, you need to put on your marketer’s hat and give up the old school SEO “tactics” that used to work but don’t anymore.
“SEO is dead. Long live SEO!”

Source:searchengineland

Peter Zmijewski is the founder and CEO at KeywordSpy. His expert knowledge on Internet Marketing practices and techniques has earned him the title “Internet Marketing Guru“ He is also an innovator, investor and entrepreneur widely recognized by the top players in the industry.