If you are reading this article, then you have probably also heard at least once in your life that SEO is dead and has been for a few years now.
Personally, I meet new customers more and more often who not only have heard or read about it a lot but also are convinced of that because some consultant told them so.
To answer the question “Is SEO dead?”, I have to take two steps back to November 1997.
A well-known web entrepreneur, Richard Hoy, posted an article about search engines on his blog in 1997, where he wrote the following:
“I submit that search engines are dying” … “SEO is getting dramatically less important”
The article caused a major stir then and contained a series of true facts for the search engines of the time.
In 1997, immense link directories were almost exclusively in use, i.e., the websites that collected links and provided a search result based only on the number of keywords in the text. It often happened that the web developers of that time created websites with a lot of hidden text, written white on white and effectively unreadable, just so they would be positioned according to specific keywords. Obviously, this system has been dead and buried for quite a while so far, and the search engines together with SEO took a considerable step forward.
Google, the primary search engine in the world, began its path of improvement in 2003, aimed at bringing increasingly cleaner and more relevant search results by means of the update known as Florida which put a stop to the optimization techniques that included an obsessive use of keywords.
Over the years, Google has maintained and improved its algorithms, and in 2011 and 2012, it developed two special algorithms that are still in use: Panda and Penguin.
These two algorithms put the words “SEO is dead” in some people’s mouths because they had eliminated and made completely useless some techniques which only a few months before that were crucial, such as nasty link building.
During those years, so many companies have died which carried out the SEO simply using software that spammed the link of a website to millions of other sites to increase its value.
So, is SEO dead for this reason?
The final answer to the question you have been asking yourself from the beginning of this article is that not only isn’t SEO dead, but it’s more alive than ever and is more useful today to promote your website, even if only some can do it.
Google has been rewarding quality content for some years now, and doing SEO in 2019 means considering all aspects of a website: from reviewing texts to creating new ones, from improving user experience to link building aimed at bringing value.
Therefore, doing SEO in 2019 means adapting to the new and future requirements of search engines and developing the websites that are promoted not only because they are technically better optimized for the algorithm, but also oriented at the user.
