I must admit, I’m expecting too much.  I want to find what I’m looking for on the first page.

This is a search engine algorithm problem.  It is also an SEO problem. 

As the web continues to grow and the number of web sites and web pages exponentially grow every day, how can the search engines keep up.  How can the SEO professional keep up?  Five years ago, ranking on the first page for a phrase was much easier than today.  You can’t argue with simple math.  Being in the top 10 with 100,000 competitors is a lot easier than a top 10 ranking with 1,000,000 competitors.

At this point, even a beginner designer/developer knows about putting keywords into  H1/H2/H3 tags, Meta Title and Description tags, alt image tags, semantic markup and CSS table-less coding.  Most of the CMS tools out there produce friendly URL’s as well as a keyword rich directory structures.

Many people (myself included), believe great content is the answer. Again, does that scale in the long run though?

The needle isn’t getting any bigger, but the haystack sure is.

So what is the answer?

I honestly don’t know but my seat of the pants gut tells me that SEO is dying because it doesn’t scale. There is only so much you can do with HTML.  And since nothing every dies on the Internet, you’ll always be competing with more and more pages no matter how great your content is.

Recently, Paul Boag wrote an article entitle Why I don’t get SEO.

I think he makes some valid points and I agree with him.  He doesn’t say “SEO is dead”, but I think he believes that SEO as we know it is dying.  There are a ton of great comments (for and against), so read those as well. Part of the problem is the definition of SEO and at least one of the commentors to Paul’s article says as much. 

Marketing your business online goes so far beyond traditional SEO.  There is Social Media, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogging, PPC, monthly Newsletters, speaking at Conferences, attending local meetups, participating in local networking groups, commenting on other Blogs, publishing and syndicating articles, writing a book and on and on and on…

Here is the thing almost everyone forgets or just doesn’t get.  All the traffic in the world to a site is worthless unless that traffic signs up for your Newsletter, makes a purchase, refers your business to friends and/or calls you for more information.  For that to happen, your site has to be user-friendly, have great content and most importantly, offer something that the visitor actually wants!!  I know, crazy isn’t it. 

SEO is dead.  But marketing is alive and well.  We just have to change the tools and methods we use.  I new name would help as well….

“Links on the first page of Google get clicked 45 times that of subsequent pages (93% of all clicks come from the first page). This is very important to remember as your biggest organic keyword opportunities are current rankings of 11-15. If you can do something to bump them up to the first page, chances are you will reap major rewards.”  - Golden Nuggets From SMX Search Analytics

93% of all SERP clicks come from the first page?!?!  That is amazing.  The next time you’re reviewing your ranking reports (you do review them don’t you?), note how many of your pages are listed on the second page (the standard listing is 10 results per page).  Review those pages.  What can you do you make them more user and search engine friendly?  Can the META tags be improved?  Can the content be better written and organized?

As the above stat indicates, moving the “Page 2″ results to the first page could improve your click-thru’s dramatically.

While you’re in there improving the SEO of those pages, don’t forget about conversion.  Do you have a single and well-defined call to action?

Good luck!