I understand why most publishers would be more passionate about paid advertising and that is fine.

I am not asking them to ditch paid advertising altogether, yet wouldn’t it be nice if their websites were a source of free organic traffic rather than having to depend on expensive traffic coming from Google AdWords or Facebook PPC?

Over the years a lot of experts have predicted the death of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO); in fact, there have been plenty of articles chronicling this. The negative impact of Google’s zoo animals, such as Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, Zebra

(I made this one up, but who knows!) on search engine rankings, traffic and sales can easily convince one that SEO is either dead or about to breathe its last. Add to this the fact that Matt Cutts, the then head of the Google web spam team, predicted guest posting (a popular SEO tactic) and many were convinced that SEO was indeed dead. However, rather than dying what has happened is that SEO has undergone an evolution and today we are dealing with a new model. Here, I would like to share what the new SEO is and how it differs from the old version.

The old SEO
This SEO is dead or almost dead. If an SEO agency provider is still presenting solutions based on the number of links, blog comments, directory links, blog networks and link wheels, do yourself a favour and ditch that agency. Today, SEOs are less about the number of links and more about their quality. Activities such as blog commenting and directory links have been exploited to death, and although it is okay to create these to some extent, they should not be your only or primary link attraction strategy.

The new SEO (SEO 2.0)
The new SEO is at the intersection of link earning, digital PR and content marketing.

Link earning
Link building is futile, but on the flip side link earning is thriving. Link earning is about creating epic content that would make people share and promote it (so that more people give it a mention). However, while working on link earning you should focus less on links and more on relationships. For example, we entered into a partnership on behalf of one of our clients with two large websites which are now translating the content of our client’s website (which is in English) into Spanish and Portuguese and publishing it on their sites (so that their tens of thousands of visitors can read it), thereby giving our client not only SEO benefits, but referral traffic and branding benefits.

If an SEO agency provider is still presenting solutions based on the number of links, blog comments, directory links, blog networks and link wheels, do yourself a favour and ditch that agency. Today, SEOs are less about the number of links and more about their quality.

Digital PR
I mentioned how Matt Cutts predicted the death of guest posting. Well, he later retracted his statement, clarifying that guest posting still lives so long as you do it in the right way (i.e. writing for relevant sites and with the intention of connecting with people rather than just to gain links). Guest posting done in the right way is not too different from what PR executives call byline articles. At Digital Marketing ROI, we were able – with approximately 474 hours of guest posting – to have our client’s site ranked on Google UK at positions one to seven for several terms with five to six figure monthly search volumes (such as ‘tyres’ with 110,000 searches per month) as well as increase organic traffic by 91.04% and monthly revenue by 23.58% to $200,000. So, as long as you are reaching out to relevant sites within your niche and pitching them an article (i.e. a guest post or a byline article) which adds value to their website (and which has a link to a relevant article on your site), you will be able to leverage both SEO and digital PR. However, it is important that you diversify your link earning campaigns, so that you are not heavily dependent on (and exploiting) one link earning strategy. Similarly, ensure you are not dependent on Google alone for your SEO (organic) traffic. Bing now accounts for about 30% of the total search traffic, so it makes sense to diversify your traffic sources by optimising your website not only for Google but for Bing as well.

Content marketing
The problem with most SEO engineers is that they are too focused on links and not enough on content. Content marketing and SEO are extremely interdependent and it is easy to confuse them. SEO is not only about link earning through various strategies, it includes the task of optimising your site so that it is easier for search engines to rank it correctly. This is a topic I have intentionally left out as I wanted to write about the elusive science of offsite SEO (link earning, etc.) which most people have misconceptions about. Content marketing is about creating the kind of content (videos, infographics, expert round up posts, etc.) which makes link earning easy; let’s face it, if your content is not truly epic, why would anyone want to link to it? However, content marketing is more than creating content; one has to promote that content as well. One could say that link earning is what makes the promotional part of content marketing work, as long as one has epic content. In this regard, check out this video (tinyurl.com/seo-suc2) in which I share three case studies about companies using content marketing smartly.

Unfortunately in Pakistan almost no e-commerce companies or brands are working with the new model SEO; clearly the ones which take the first step will have the first mover advantage.

Syed Irfan Ajmal is a serial entreprenuer, author and digital marketing consultant. He shares tips on how to use SEO, content marketing and branding for business success at his blog www.SyedIrfanAjmal.com