Does SEO Really Work?
Miami SEO Company Explains SEO & Why It Is Not Dead
Is SEO Dead? Well, lets talk about what search engine optimization is and where it came from first to really find out if it is dead or not. Let’s call this blog post, “Search Engine History 101”. First things first, I want you to watch this video that is presented by Matt Cutts, the head of search at Google explaining how search works.
Who invented the first search engine?
The oldest of all search engines is actually “Archie”, which was created in 1990 by a fellow named Alan Emtage. This Mcgill University student (Montreal) originally wanted to call his search engine “Archives” but instead had to keep a shorter name to stay in compliance with the standard naming conventions of the Unix world. Early in the year of 1990 there was no such thing as the world wide web but there was still an “internet” and many files were scattered all over the network. The most common way of storing and retrieving files at the time was through FTP which is still commonly used today. So for those of you who want to know who invented the first search engine, we could say it was Alan Emtage for the sake of keeping things simple, there were probably a few people out there who had a search engine before him that we just never found about. Of course after Alan, there were many others who created bigger and better search engines and through the process of search engine evolution, Google and other major search engines were created and available to the masses.
What would we do with out search engines?
Search engines are needless to say, the best things since sliced bread. The endless amount of answers and knowledge that you can gather from search engines truly makes an impact on how we use technology in our favor for everything. A life without search engines would not be so easy anymore, they are a pivotal part of innovation in all fields and almost everyone in the world is using them. According to sources, Google is used 4.7 billion times a day, with all that traffic it has inevitable become one of the most powerful advertising site in the world. According to sources, Google raked in 50 billion in revenue in 2012, majority of that revenue came from Adwords needless to say. The monopolistic nature that has developed with aggressive PPC marketing competition has driven the value of advertisement space up to unheard of amounts per click, some even as high as 370$ per click in the mesothelioma business. If these keywords are costing this amount of money, its logical to assume that the people paying for these clicks are making substantial profits.
Organic search engine marketing is also very lucrative however, there is a lot of work cut out for SEO’s that are trying to organically show up for competitive keywords. With business owners that have huge marketing budgets, SEO has become fueled with huge budgets and has evolved into a very intricate process that requires huge funding in order to compete with the big boys. SEO, or search engine optimization is the process of getting a website to show up in the natural results as high as possible to avoid paying for clicks. The processes involved are in a sense considered manipulative in nature towards the search engine algorithms. Search engines are constantly trying to fight the SEO’s that are using techniques that are considered unfair or “black hat” by updating the algorithm so that it can catch the tricksters out there and reward those sites that provide a good user experience.
User Experience is King
What is a good user experience? Well lets think about this, for a search engine user who is looking for something he or she is expecting a relevant and reliable result. So, if Google is ensuring that the websites that show up are relevant and reliable then they are doing a good job, providing the user with a good experience. If Google didn’t try to catch the guys that are using black hat techniques, then all kinds of irrelevant and unreliable results would be showing up in the SERP’s providing users with a poor experience. SEO is something that is needed for search engines to be successful.
If search engines did not have search engine guidelines or best practices, they would be cluttered with all kinds of websites that do not provide good user experience so for someone to say that SEO is dead, is not accurate. SEO is what organic search relies on, that being said SEO will always change because of the fact that search engine algorithms are not perfected. There are simply too many pages and combinations out there for a perfect search engine, back in 2010 things that use to work in terms of SEO don’t work anymore and in fact can harm your websites SEO presence. Its the evolutionary process that makes SEO so volatile, the search engines and the black hat SEO’s are constantly at war with each other while the white hat SEO’s (the SEO’s that practice ethical techniques) sit back and enjoy the controversy by blogging about it.
The bottom line is that search engines provide business owners with a very lucrative way to advertise their businesses, Google doesn’t care if you are how much money your business makes, to Google you are just a website, a bunch of codes, 0’s and 1’s. Google just cares about how well optimized you are compared to the competitors trying to rank for the same keyword as you. If you are using up to date techniques then you are probably a believer of SEO due to its financial rewards.
Think Like A Search Engine
Remember, SEO is always going to change so try and think like a search engine, the next time you hear someone tell you that using outbound links is giving away link juice, consider this, if CNN can rank for “news” and they have a shit ton of outbound links then why can’t you do it? Google doesn’t care if you are a multi-million dollar company or a kid in basement or even in a different continent that knows how to SEO the hell out of a site to get it ranking. Google wants you to practice white hat SEO. So if you are looking for the best SEO company in Miami or Florida, ask yourself this first, who is ranking number one?
About The Author
Jason Hawkins / http://www.themiamiseocompany.com
Jason Hawkins is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Miami SEO Company. He has over ten years of experience in search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization and lead generation. His core responsibilities include identifying ways to increase value of services rendered, training staff on advanced SEO topics, and A/B testing internal processes to consistently improve client return on investment.
