In a sign that the epitaph for SEO or Search Engine Optimization is slowly being etched on tombstone granite — by the traditional definition that is — the company that has arguably been the single greatest advocate for SEO has taken the SEO out of its name.
When Seattle’s SEOmoz was founded it combined the open source community spirit of the Mozilla movement (remember the Netscape dragon?), and a .org domain, while championing the three most mysterious letters of the era. At the time, “S-E-O” reflected what was, practically speaking, the only point of engagement between the Web marketing community and the search engines. Heck, the search engines were Web marketing , pure and simple, yet none of the engines were forthcoming about disclosing the algorithms that determined who ranked highest in search results.
In an interview at the time, yours truly asked Dr. Eric Schmidt why Google did not have an ombudsman representing the Web user community, both consumer and trade to field questions and try and arbitrate an understanding of Google’s “golden rules ?” “Good idea!” Schmidt told me. It never happened. SEO firms have been largely left in the dark to this day, only able to guess at what factors are the most decisive for their clients search engine rank and market exposure.
SEOmoz shed the most light on the subject with a blog that was “radically transparent,” and the daily diary of the search engine industry. The company began to produce an annual SEO Ranking Factors list. From elements like “Title tags” to “Link building,” here were the missing recipes that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft would let marketers sniff, but not taste. SEOmoz became the barometric pressure meter of the SEO industry following publications like SearchEngineWatch and then SearchEngineLand in deciphering and weighting what each cryptic search engine update held in store for search marketing practitioners and its ranks swelled to 25,000 members.
Now the pendulum has swung, from largely “on-page” SEO factors like keyword density, title tags, anchor text links and domain names to external, “off-page” factors like inbound links, social media popularity, and co-citations (where the mere mention of a brand name on an authoritative site earns it points, even without a link.)
Make no mistake, authority links are still the 800-pound gorilla in the room, that gorilla with a capial “G.” As the #1 ranking factor, links were why SEOmoz created its own Web-crawling spidering agent, now known as Rogerbot, and populated Open Site Explorer as a dynamic directory, not of the Web’s content but of its linking structure. Today, if you want to know who links to whom, with what industry authority, trust and domain strength, Rand Fishkin and the new moz are still your “go-to” guys.
Only now that social media has become so pervasive, the SEO in Planet Moz seems more like more like the Empire State building, or the Space Needle, compared to the new Freedom Tower. It is more symbolic of the historic ranking factors that dot the SEO landscapes as opposed to leading edge engagement techniques. The term “Inbound Marketing” is now the euphemism that best applies to marketing by intent, by content strategy and social appeal, and by inviting user engegement instead of interrupting user attention (the old world broadcast model).
With a new chapter for the new moz , and a new analytics service it is now rolling out, the moral of the story may be thus. Best practices, savvy Web link networking and industry transparency are still what distinguishes Black or Gray Hat SEO from the online marketing White Hats. SEO is dead. Long live SEO! In other words, you can take the SEO out of the moz, but not the moz out of SEO! – Larry Sivitz
