As if mastering the obscure art of ethical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) wasn’t difficult enough along comes a term to make it more confusing: SEO 2.0.
An ill-defined and conveniently vague term that can mean almost anything, including:
- Converting visitors to prospects who take action such as filling out a form, downloading a white paper, watching a video, or placing an order
- Optimizing your site for social media and link sharing with services like StumbleUpon, Digg and Facebook
- Leveraging long tail keywords which draw smaller but more highly motivated audiences likely to take action.
It’s About Fear
But in my opinion the term is designed to instill fear in prospective clients of SEO services: “if you don’t do this you’ll lose sales.” Utter nonsense. The fundamentals of good search engine optimization for pharma, biotech and medical devices remains the same. Even in the face of imminent health care reform:
- Use keywords in the page title
- Manage Page-Rank flow properly
- Follow best practices for semantic structuring of content
- Avoid duplicate content, or when unavoidable, make use of the canonical tag
- Include a site map for the search engine to crawl
- Share your information on 3rd party sites where appropriate
- Read your analytics reports and respond accordingly
If this all sounds familiar it should. Your agency is probably already doing this for you. They know that it takes time to build rank and the good ones prepare you accordingly. So when you hear a pitch for “SEO 2.0″ skip it and save yourself both the time and the aspirin. SEO 2.0 is just a gimmick you can safely ignore.
Buzzword Status Score
- Hype: Moderate
- Value: None
- Origin: Vendors seeking to sell you something through fear, obfuscation and doubt.
- Timeframe: Makes the case for buzzword euthanasia
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Thanks for the interesting post on SEO 2.0. I think we can agree on 2 things:
We seem to differ on the belief on whether it is a hollow term. I’m not sure what “the people’s SEO” or “paradigm shift” means, but you can be sure that it would get you laughed out of most budget meetings. “SEO 2.0″ is a BS Term rightfully placed in the BS Report.
Thank you for referencing SEO 2.0