You can really take a lot of flak from people who don't read and listen carefully to what you say.



Note to reader: Never declare the death of something even if it is a foregone conclusion and 100% true unless you are ready for some grief from the peanut gallery.

Such was the case when we started telling people on webinars and teleconferences that SEO was dead.

SEO? DEAD? My goodness you could hear the cans of whoopass opening up from all the 90-pound geekling search engine optimization firms around the world.

The pocket protector (a geek's gauntlet) had been thrown down.

Context has a lot to do with any bold statement and declaring SEO dead was in a context that explains perfectly what I meant by it.

The web has changed drastically this year. Call it web 2.0 or whatever you wish, but the webscape is a mighty different place than it was a year ago.

Everything has changed from search engines to social networking to publishing platforms (what you actually run your content on).

I guess I should qualify that by saying the web has changed, but most marketers have yet to wake up and smell the coffee.

Back to SEO being dead. The context in which this declaration was made was when we were recently discussing the new results we'd gotten from heavy testing and the fact that what used to work for us no longer worked.

One might think ?bummer, man!? Actually it is a blessing in disguise. With the right system for publishing, the right technology, tools and tactics, the web is easier to market on than it ever has been before.

Website owners no longer have to pour through endless forum threads and documentation, expensive courses and training seminars to learn heavy-duty search engine optimization.

It is no longer necessary to do anything more than post and rank, once you have the right tools working for you.

One big reason is that Google and the other engines are switching to become more dynamic and fluid in their rankings. This is evidenced by our own testing and what you've probably seen yourself.

There has been a fluidity to search engine rankings in the last few months unbecoming the slow, lumbering state the engines used to operate in when trying to stay up to date and relevant.

Google is actually living up to its promise to reward webmasters who develop relevant, topical, visitor-useable content. Visitor Optimization, they call it.

It was a leap of faith, but we started publishing solely to please our markets without aggressively optimizing. Just like Google asked us to do. No hardcore late night sessions doing endless keyword research or inflating our keyword densities to cheat the system.

(We've concluded that trying cheat a multi-billion dollar mega corporation with thousands of geeks programming and watching our every move was a dumb idea.)

Simply putting out content that the market wanted appreciated is all we do now.

Guess what? My sites now enjoy a plethora of top 10 rankings in Google for scores of keyword phrases. Keywords people are actually using to find my site, not just ?vanity? keywords no one searches on.

We are doing this with no aggressive or even moderately aggressive search engine optimization.

We are using a blog platform that performs better than anything else we've used (based on Wordpress). We are using high tech RSS tools to syndicate content. We are using social networking to get links. We are tagging and pinging and using autodiscovery in a new way.

Aside from using common sense SEO strategies like carefully naming our posts, linking within our sites with keyword phrases (as long as it makes sense to do so) and naturally writing about relevant topics, there is nothing remotely like the old SEO we had to do on the old web.

Once people take the same leap of faith we have and start using publishing tools that engines eat up along with posting regular, ORIGINAL, relevant content, they will start to see the same results.

What you need to see this happen for you:

1. You must be blogging on a high-tech platform (At least Wordpress out of the box ? nothing does better in the engines.)

2. Create multiple tagged RSS feeds based on your top keywords and use autodiscovery in your template to shove content in the face of spiders.

3. Tag, Tag, Tag! And Ping! Ping! Ping!

4. Supplement your original content with relevant syndicated content.

5. Post every single day, even more than once a day, on real topics of interest to your market.

Make these changes and watch the fun begin. Post, rank, and watch those aggressive, sleepless, stressful search engine optimization days fade away in your rearview mirror forever!

Copyright 2006 Tale Chaser Publishing, Inc.