When I saw this heading ….SEO is Dead on a tweet, for a moment there was spinning followed by a long pause before I could bring myself to click on the link to read the article.

Understand where am coming from, Search Engine Optimization – SEO has been on of our differentiating selling point for Content and Website Development Services. So this heading for me stopped time, with me contemplating on what next.

But after gathering guts, I continued to read article.

According to Sean Jackson SEO is officially dead, in his article he continued to explain….

Not the SEO practice, but the term.

But what term should take its place?

One that more accurately defines what people really mean when they say “SEO.”

So … what do we really mean when we say “SEO”?

Talk with any professional expert in SEO and you will quickly find they rarely just spend time optimizing a site for a search engine.

In fact, most people who started out as SEO experts have morphed their services over the years to encompass the full spectrum of content marketing activity.

nomenclatureMake no mistake: legitimate SEO tactics still matter today as part of any content marketing campaign.

The problem is that the terms themselves — SEO and search optimization — are used when discussing what is actually the broader strategy of content marketing.

Introducing “OC/DC” — the replacement for SEO

What people really mean when they say “SEO” is the idea of optimizing content for discovery and conversion across a wide spectrum of the web … not just search engines.

Think about it: When you optimize your site, is it just so that it will rank in Google … or are your goals wider than that?

Absolutely, for many sites, traffic from Google is important. But sites get traffic from a variety of sources — social media, related blogs, and so forth.

Are search engines the only source of valuable traffic? Of course not. Yet we still call the tactics of optimizing for organic traffic “SEO.”

Silly isn’t it?

Optimizing Content for Discovery and Conversion, or “OC/DC” for short, encapsulates this idea of amplifying the overall reach and results of content creation.

OC/DC defines a new role for the former SEO activities, broadening the scope and applicability to what a professional online marketer actually does.

The real rock stars of search optimization have always known that it took a lot more than just getting the top result in Google to measure the success of their work.

Now is the time for OC/DC to replace SEO in the online marketing lexicon … and leave the spammers and link buyers in the dustbin of history.

How should OC/DC be defined?

OC/DC can be thought of as two distinct areas of focus:

  1. External optimization
  2. On-site optimization

External optimization refers to traffic generated to your site, and the research and refinement necessary to improve its quantity and quality.

The external part of OC/DC includes numerous traffic sources — search engines, social media sites, blogs, as well as aggregation sites like Slideshare.net and content syndication sources like Business Insider.

On-site optimization makes the most of these external efforts. This matters because improving the quantity and quality of your traffic only helps you if visitors take the action you want when they find your site.

Load times, usefulness of content, responsive design, and ease of conversion are all encompassed within the on-site portion of OC/DC.

Once you understand the breadth of what OC/DC entails, it is easy to see how it plays a crucial role in the execution of a smart content marketing strategy.

 

Click here to read the rest of Sean Jackson’s article Read more

 

Written by: 

Pauline is the CEO at Allen Cole, also consults for iWork and Elite Writers Hub. She works with small and medium size organizations to increase their visibility online through corporate blogging, content creation, website development and social media engagement.