Is SEO Dead?

A lot of the major search engines have been tweaking the way that they calculate who is at the top of the search result page when a web surfer looks something up on a search engine. Some of these search engines are claiming that SEO is dead, and there is no way to force yourself to the top (except working for years and having a quality product). For people who are not trying to promote a business or make a living off of the Internet, maybe the death of SEO would be a positive event for the evolution of the Internet.

If you don’t know what SEO is, it’s the manipulation of keywords that are used to find a website to make it appear at the top of the search page when someone searches the Internet. For example, if you search for “SEO services”, the SEO firm that is the best at this manipulation will have their website towards the top of the page, and the SEO company that isn’t too good at what they do can be found on the 103rd page of the search results.

So why would it be so great if SEO died? The reason that SEO services are so terrible for the average web surfer is that they put a lot of junk on the Internet. They use a lot a keyword spamming, which give you irrelevant results for what you are really looking for. For example, if you are searching for information on a friend, and enter his name in the search engine, you are probably going to have at least half of those results that are the result of this keyword spamming. When entering a name in, some of the results will lead you to telephone books, some of the results will lead you to people finding companies, and the rest of the results of probably lead you to the pages that actually have your friend on it.

A lot of companies pay a lot of money to a SEO company to get them to the top of the search engine pages, while the majority of people who have websites for fun don’t rely on any SEO services all. It’s really unfortunate that people can buy their way to the top and trick consumers to click on their website. If SEO was dead, there would be very few individual who would complain.

Another benefit to the death of SEO is that a major SEO firm would have no incentive for putting junk on the Internet. If you have ever clicked on a page that you thought was exactly what you were searching for and then discovered that it was just a bunch of words, with absolutely no meaning, you know how frustrating SEO can be. Without search engine optimization, these pages wouldn’t be up there, and you wouldn’t get the false hope of finding exactly the nugget of information that you needed on the Internet, getting your hopes up, and then being terribly disappointed by it when you found out that the information was useless.

If SEO was dead, companies will lead be on an even playing field with individuals, and of those people who provided the best websites with the best information would be at the top of the search engines, not the people with the best engineers, the best keyword spammers and the most web pages. SEO probably won’t die with these changes, but average surfers can hope!