I have been involved with digital marketing since the days when it was heralded as ‘new media’.

I lived through the ‘web 1.0’ era, where sites were static and very much a one way dialogue with very limited interactivity. I welcomed the advent of ‘web 2.0’, which was really a change of philosophy where web publishers actively encouraged users to connect and engage online - websites were no longer digital brochures but a 24/7 extension of your brand.

Nobody has really been talking about web 3.0 but I think that the evolution of SEO is forcing web publishers to take the philosophy of web 2.0 and push it even harder.

You have no doubt heard that SEO is dead. I don’t believe that SEO is dead but there is no doubt that it has evolved and ‘old school / lazy / bad’ SEO has been consigned to the past. As Google has adopted an increasingly aggressive stance on any tactic that is borne from a desire to outsmart the search engines, website owners have been forced into thinking about their users rather than their search rankings.

This has to be a great thing and it is an exciting time to be involved with SEO, whatever the ‘SEO is dead’ crowd like to say. ‘Good SEO’ is very much still alive and kicking and search engines remain absolutely vital to most online journeys.

What does SEO look like in 2014 and what does it take to succeed?

You should not optimise for search engines - you should invest time in understanding what your target audience really wants and publishing industry leading content on your website. If it is good enough and you are successful in getting it in front of the right people, links (and rankings / traffic) will follow.

Personally, I would be happy to see the death of ‘SEO’ as a label. There are lots of labels emerging to replace ‘SEO’ but my personal favourite is ‘inbound marketing’. At the heart of the concept of inbound marketing is the realisation that you need to earn the attention of your target audience.

Say goodbye to buying / begging / bugging your way in (as David Meerman Scott (author of the excellent ‘The New Rules of Marketing and PR’) puts it) and listen to what your customers want. Create content for them and adopt a PR mindset to engage with relevant audiences rather than asking your SEO team to wave a magic wand over poor quality content. Aim to build up your brand online rather than obsessing about how many links you built last month.

I am not sure that there will ever be a web 3.0, but there is no doubt that you can’t just pay lip service to the philosophy of web 2.0 if you want to succeed at SEO. If you don’t put your users at the core of every decision that you make with regards to your online marketing, you should not expect to be convincing the search engines to give you the visibility that you crave.

 

By Joe Friedlein, Founder, at Browser Media. 

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