Curation Revolution

SEO Muscle Memory
I'm a former SEO. I guess that definition applies since organic SEO was worth millions when I was a Director of Ecommerce. I spent a week in Mill Valley CA with SEO Guru Bruce Clay and know the tricks Alley's Scoop refers to and I agree. There was a time when optimization alone could win. That was a different time in important ways:

* Less noise, less competition for top listings.

* SEO "Tricks" weren't known by a large population.

* That was the way Google structured the game.

What Navneet Panda, Google's brilliant engineer, did in modifying Google's algorithm changed everything. Google was in danger of being flooded by social signals and User Generated Content. Not so much now. 

Social signals + the Google float, an innovation Google originally created to expand ad inventory, became a lifesaver and a heart breaker. It is or will be impossible to optimize a website into Google top listing now (or soon).

People think of Google as this monolith, the all-knowing OZ. Not so much. Google indexes pages and keywords. I was asked the other day to win a tit for tat keyword battle and it was winnable NOW in the old way. Soon, as that vertical gets more sophisticated over time (and they all do), the ability to optimize into a SEO win will disappear. 

There is the tricky rub. Muscle memory says, to the person who asked for the old kind of help, we should be able to optimize to victory. Sorry, not so much anymore. Time to learn a new dance. Time to tell great stories. Time to win hearts and minds because that is the only way to SEO now. 

I wrote about the end of one approach, something I called "small ball SEO" and the beginning of another (great stories well told on a User Generated Content rich social platform) recently:

Imagination, Money And Internet Marketing
http://scenttrail.blogspot.com/2012/12/imagination-money-and-internet-marketing.html    

BTW, I turned down the tit for tat SEO job. Life is way too short for such nonsense. Teams I've managed have profitably made more than $30M online with Average Order Values (AOVs) of around $60 so LOTS of transactions.

I share that stat because if you were to ask me the most important idea in creating so much value here is my answer:

DO WHAT GOOGLE TELLS YOU TO DO!