Let's watch the video below from Rand Fishkin first before we discussing about why SEO alone is dead and not enough anymore!
Look at the two diagrams below.
SEO – 5 Years Ago
SEO – Current
By comparing two diagrams, it is very clear that SEO did evolve. Besides producing high quality content and getting quality backlinks, we now need to integrate social media marketing into your SEO strategy. We need to build our own social circle or virtually community to support our SEO strategy. We need other things as well, for example, rich snippets, snippets optimization, usage data, brand metrics, etc. Google definitely started using social signal as their search engine ranking factors. Kindly watch the video below from Matt Cutts.
This is my prediction for future search engine ranking. Each website has its own reputation. Google ranks each website based on reputation. For example, the full score is 50/50, 10 points from Facebook, 10 points from Twitter, 10 points from Linkedin, 10 points from FourSquare and 10 points from Google.
If your score is 5 points from Facebook, 3 points from Twitter, 6 points from Linkedin, 4 points from FourSquare and 2 points from Google. So your total score is 20/50. Google will compare your score with industry average score to determine your ranking.
But no matter how search engines or SEO evolve, as long as your focus is on human, it is safe. For example, you produce high quality content, products or services, you provide great customer services and you engage them and talk to them, you are safe because as I told, it is human world. Eventually, it is human who votes for your website.
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Thanks for the post, Kent. While I agree with the general direction things are going, I'm not sure I agree that Google will hand over 80% of ranking values to social networks, nor that they would all be given equal value. Facebook and Twitter seem like the dominant forces right now of course, but this could all change pretty rapidly, especially with Google's jump into the social media world with Plus. If we assume your 50-point scale, I think Google itself would keep at least 25 points if not 30, and if Plus catches on, that will get a disproportionate share as well over Facebook at least, given the Google/Facebook animosity.
Like the graphics - a good simple way to illustrate the changes wrought by Panda!