For those of you working in the industry, this is no surprise: we’ve had some serious hints dropped our good friend Google for years now. For those of you who don’t, please let me briefly explain my view on this vast topic.

SEO = Cheating.

I can already hear you folks screaming “Wow wow wow, hold your horses, dude”. To prove my point, let’s take a step back on what Search Engine Optimisation is: a set of strategies, hacks, and various methods used to help a website to rank better on search engine result pages.

Now that we have the basics covered, let’s take it one step further: why do people use search engines? Well, because people want to find something. Duh!

So let us connect the dots now, shall we? Basically, search engines want their users to find the most relevant piece of information possible, whereas SEOs are trying to get a webpage to rank better regardless of its content (based on on-page optimisation, link-building, etc.).

The key is relevance, not optimisation.

So how do you think search engines are going to react towards overly optimised websites, cheating their way around the effort to provide its users with the most relevant content? Bingo: Bad.

Do I have anything to prove my claim? Hell yeah! Some of you might be familiar with Google Penguin algorithm update. The idea was to decrease the rankings of over-optimised websites.

What else? Well, Matt Cutts’ SPAM team is doing a pretty good job at penalizing websites trying to be smarter than the rest. Here’s a late example of their work.

So, if SEO is dead, what do I do?

Well, I lied (Sorry, Mom!). SEO isn’t exactly dead. In fact, SEO has become Content Marketing.

If search engines base their algorithms on relevance, they clearly need to be fed with interesting, well written, detailed content, that people want to use as source, link to, share on social media, etc.

What I’d do is (1) start a company blog, (2) involve the top people of your organisation to write meaningful, actionable content, (3) if possible hire a (kickass) copywriter, (4) produce loads of content, (5) invite industry big shots to write on your blog, (6) promote and amplify the crap out of that content, (7) iterate 4, 5 & 6 like a boss. ☺

This is my very first post on Medium. I hope you enjoyed it.

Here is the link to another post detailing the future of content marketing.