Social Media Has No Future

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I’m sure you are already ready to post some nasty comments on this blog about how big of an idiot I am. Before you do that, please hear me out.

I have recently come across two prominent (Shoemoney, The Simple Dollar) bloggers in the blogosphere that both had written posts about how SEO doesn’t really matter and how SEO has no future. I understand that they both wrote these posts to generate buzz but the message they are sending is very misleading. Both of these guys are very smart and know a ton about blogging and internet marketing in general. They also share the same trait in that neither of them has a strong background in SEO and they may not truly understand the big picture.

The post at the simple dollar is actually a good post and I agree with some of what he is saying, what I don’t agree with is the fact that he starts out by saying it doesn’t matter. His main point was that if you write great content then the keywords will be in place and the page is already optimized. Writing great content is an excellent suggestion but if you really understand SEO, you know that you have to research and choose keywords people actually search for and write content to include those words and try to keep a good balance of key phrase density. You need to write good titles and descriptions targeting those key phrases as well.

My background is in SEO and so I know how valuable it is. I don’t have a ton of experience in social media, so I could easily write a post about how social media has no future because the bulk of my traffic comes from SEO, not social media. I make alot of money online taking advantage of the SEO knowledge that I have. I could stand up and shout SEO IS THE FUTURE, NOT SOCIAL MEDIA and try to make my point. But just because I am proficient in SEO doesn’t have anything to do with the future or effectiveness of social media.

The truth of the matter is that they both are very valuable internet marketing tactics. They are both legitimate ways to build traffic and you can make a lot of money online implementing one or both of the techniques.

So SEO does have a future and it does matter, social media however is dead.

Is Google’s Keyword Tool Accurate?

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I love the fact that Google has started showing search volume on their free keyword tool. A couple of things you need to be careful of.

  1. Make sure you change the “Match Type” to exact in their drop down menu. – Google defaults to show you the broad match for key phrases which is helpful for PPC but not for SEO. In order to get an accurate gauge of search volume for a specific keyword you need to see the Exact match type.
  2. The keyword tool is not completely accurate. – I did a key phrase search for the term “landscape contractors” and it showed that the key phrase gets about 2,600 searches a month. LawnCareDirectory.com ranks on Google #2 for that term. In the last 30 days I have received 50 visitors from Google users searching that term.This immediately raised a red flag for me so I did another search for “landscaping companies” and the keyword showed 1,900 searches a month. My site ranks #1 on Google for “landscaping companies”, so I checked the stats for the last 30 days and the site received 262 visitors for that term.Lesson learned: Use those numbers to learn which key phrases are more popular but don’t count on anywhere close to that amount of visitors if you rank #1 for the term.
  3. The tool seems to time out alot. Maybe it’s just me, or maybe it is the overwhelming demand for the tool now that it has those new features but Probably half of the times I used Googles keyword tool today it didn’t work.