Peintros

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But one thing has remained constant during all these years – the reputation that I’ve built up has always backed me up whenever I start something new online. I can count on all my former customers following me over because of the brand I’ve developed and the fact I walk the walk I talk.

SEO is a quick fix….but personal reputation will always win out.

Data points,

Barbara

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There will likely be some level of failure of search engines to do this. In that area SEO is largely about convincing search engines they are what the user wants (regardless of what the user really wants). My guess is the search engines will keep getting better at reducing the gap to be exploited. Therefore SEO may well morph more into usability, customer focus type activity (if that becomes increasingly important to rank highly).

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Your ideas above are great, true and extremely important. However, the entire process that you used to brand your company was built on a strong foundation of SEO. You claim that SEO will be a thing of the past and I’ll guarantee that there will always be a need, and demand, for an industry that focuses on helping businesses improve their online exposure, online reputation , and website performance and usability.

There are always going to be factors that help a website rank well and the need for people that understand those factors will last along with the Internet. If only branded companies do occupy the first page of Google results one day, I’ll find a search engine that didn’t take the easy way out, along with everyone else that enjoys options.

Of course if you focus your marketing efforts on branding and not on SEO you’ll see a decrease in conversions from search. That just sounds like a dumb way to run a business.

Your 3 step process is all good but leaving SEO around to “die” doesn’t make much sense. Like Todd said, SEO and branding compliment each other.

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You can brand the hell out of a website build on a crappy eCommerce platform that renders crawlers dead in their tracks at the home page, or creates bloated code that inflates page sizes and load times, etc, but if you ignore what makes a site crawler friendly you can the prospect of getting some Google traffic goodbye – and I don’t know a single small business owner who wouldn’t be upset to learn that their website is inelligible to get organic referrals from Google.

Branding is massively important – there’s no doubt about that – but you’d be a fool to focus all efforts there and assume that all other pieces will just fall into place.

“Also, since many customer conversations take place online, your inbound link profile will improve as will your traffic and conversion rate. And by the way, so will your SEO.”

Item 3 sounded a lot like the practice of link building or dare I say link buying (incentivize?!?)….

“3) Incentivize customers to talk about you and your USP. You can call this viral marketing or word of mouth marketing or any number of things.”

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Greg, if I were you, I would focus my efforts on writing dull, boring posts on irrelevant topics. You certainly don’t want to be labeled a linkbaiter.

I think most SEOs who have been around the industry a while think of the SEO 101 items as think you should do when you build a site anyway, not something that will provide 1999 results in rankigns traffic, etc.

The SEO industry is meshing with PPC, SMO, SEO, Usability, and much more. I think a better post would have been what is the future of SEO not that it is dead.

SEO evolves, and grows daily. It is not a static target that can be defined.

And your point about brand. Any company small or large has to build a brand and USP to grow thrive and dominate.

SEO is just one cog in this machine not the end all and be all. I doubt many of the SEOs that work at a high level feel they are gods, just mortals doing their part in the machine.

-Sri Nagubandi

Your discussion of branding covers the USP / Improving Touch Points and Word of mouth / Viral marketing. That’s great for someone who knows bout your site.

When someone with no connections comes online they are still going to google/yahoo/msn; how does this affect that touch point?