Thread: What would make you quit SEO?

Yeah, I have a similar sentiment on SEO as tetrapak and iowadawg. Formally, I'll admit SEO is still around, and still important, but fundamentally everything comes down to offering great products and services, and any good business person should have that as one of their top priorities anyway. Good search engines reward that. Good social networks reward that too. They do so because that's in everyone's best interest.

What I think is increasingly happening is that SEO begins to overlap exactly that, and as it does so it becomes almost meaningless as a term. If all SEO means now is making great products and using marketing practices which mostly make sense regardless of search engines, then there's no need to call it SEO anymore, and not calling it SEO cuts us from its ugly origins and associated connotations: spam, gaming the search engines, and other things which can rightfully be considered as fraud - trying to get unearned traffic.

It may very well be that some time in the future we will look back at the SEO era and wonder how did anyone ever think this was a good idea: creating search engines for the purpose of finding good quality, relevant and important content, and then allowing them to be gamed in ways that have nothing to do with quality, relevancy or importance. If any other variable other than quality, relevance and importance count, then it defeats the whole purpose of having such a search engine.

Ill quit SEO when they ban my ip in facebook, twitter, ezine, digg, reddit, etc. Or I would quit if the Panda Updates became an everyday thing to such an extent where no strategy would give you edge over the competition.

{removed by admin: need less link-dropping and more on-topic discussion please. ~ thanks}

I think that anyone that doesn't produce content should quit SEO since all they are interested in is link building which fills the Internet up with spam.

traffic and get ranks are both important for your websites

{ link removed by mod. Please use the signature system. }

I am totally done with seo, i would like to make money by social media optimizer more than ranking in search engines. Google is killing seo for small businesses.

I quit the industry because of the amount of demand it is and how long and boring it can be! I hated the idea of sitting there for hours on end and just building links - it's simple yet tedious and annoying.

With everything you need to re-invent yourself to stay relevant. Here's a good article The Anatomy of Tomorrow's Inbound Marketing Strategy Today | SEOmoz which discusses inbound marketing strategy. Inbound marketing uses content marketing, social media marketing and SEO to develop a campaign. The focus is on revenue rather than a SEO approach of using keyword ranking as a metric to measure success.

That's a pretty good article. The astute author sure has mastered a profound and colorful use of the King's English.

Originally Posted by bogart

The focus is on revenue rather than a SEO approach of using keyword ranking as a metric to measure success.

In other words, treating the business like a business. Always amazed to see people focused on meaningless metrics instead of the bottom line.