I guess that would depend on what they are saying isn't important anymore.
I would say that SEO will only ever increase in importance. How are people
going to find your businesses products if they aren't on the first or second
page of a search engine? It is something that takes careful fine tuning and
attention to make sure your competitors don't get listed before you. Of
course you can opt for the sponsored ad, but as a consumer I always check
those out last.
That and the fact that the algorithms for SEO seem to be constantly
changing. Here's an example of how complex SEO *can* be.
Obviously for a search engine to find you they must crawl your website. You
would then maybe decide to put a link to a CGI program that lists product
names/descriptions back to the crawler. Something that I learned is that
crawlers don't necessarily read everything on the page and instead they only
take into account the portions before "the fold" because they figure you
deemed that important enough to have above the fold and the other stuff not
important enough, so they then would take the time to index it. In the
scenario I laid out that might mean only the first 100 products produced
from your CGI program would ever get organically indexed in google.
Other things I found interesting as I pursued SEO:
- The amount of time you have owned your domain plays into your organic
listing (of course, on top of the name of your domain and how it applies to
the search terms)
- What you do and don't put in links plays a role. If you put a word in a
sentence as link to another page then a search engine would think you
deemed that word more important than others.
- What you highlight on a page can play a role (i.e. H1 tags, bold tags,
etc)
There are many more concepts and theories on SEO, and my knowledge is
probably out of date.
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/
On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Mike <koldark@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is SEO much of a concern anymore? I have heard several respected
marketers/tech people say that SEO isn't as important anymore. You still
have some basic requirements, like a human readable URL, good descriptive
links, etc.
--
Mike Wills
http://mikewills.info
P: (507) 933-0880 | Skype: koldark
midrange.com
