It’s starting to seem like the Golden Era of search has ended.  Only a few years ago, you could travel to just about any forum populated with Webmasters and you’d hear glowing reports of how explosive the boom market of search really was.  These days you might still here some success stories, but you can also expect to listen to many tales of woe and frustration.  That brings us to our point.

Is SEO Still The Art Of High Rankings?

Are SEOs now a dying breed?

Let’s examine the question first.  Of course we should point out that search engine optimization is still very much alive and many self-described ‘SEOs’ are doing well.  Yet market dynamics have really changed in the last few years, and SEO as a standalone practice would seemingly be in decline.

There’s a whole lot more to successful search engine and internet marketing these days, and SEO is only one part of the picture.  Consider just how much search engine friendliness is already built into programs.  Wordpress can be made very search engine friendly in minutes with a plugin.  Most popular applications are the same.  You no longer have to have heavy knowledge of the dark arts of SEO when so much of it is pre-built and the rest is a result of off-page factors.

SEOs are essentially ‘backlinkers’ these days.  Many of them have been relegated to attempting to ‘create backlinks’ through multiple channels to help impact client’s search engine ratings.  This is great, but as anyone who’s been paying attention in the last few years has probably noticed, social signals are now just as important if not more important than backlinks!  That compounds the job of an ‘SEO’ even more by making them have to learn SMM in order to compete!

At what point will all SEOs drop the title and focus on a broader title?  I don’t know.  What do you think?