E-marketing Strategy: SEO Is Dead. 
CDO Rules

The second killer blow to SEO arrived in January 2012. Google integrated its young—but growing—social network, Google+ into its SERPs—further removing its results from the grasp of Web developers, and officially moving the battleground for content discovery from search engines to social networks.

Search Engine Optimization—at least as it has existed for the past five years—is dead. Google can now differentiate "useful" content from "optimized" content.

To many of us—and to content-producers especially—this is a big, fat gift from Google. It is now less important to understand the intricacies of meta tags, keywords and link-building strategies than it is to understand how to produce valuable and compelling content that people will want to read and share—something we've already been puzzling over for years! This is the dawn of Content Discovery Optimization, or CDO.

CDO, unlike SEO, does not focus primarily on optimization techniques to drive high search engine rankings and high traffic. CDO focuses on content discovery across all platforms: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, the blogosphere, and your own website. In many ways, this is an easier—or at least less technical—strategy: Produce valuable content and present it beautifully.

Google has coronated social content discovery, and other search engines are following suit. They've realized that the recommendations of millions of people are a more accurate indicator of quality than easily manipulated website links and content. And, therefore, in very short order, people will use only their social networks to discover new books, magazines, articles, videos and other content. Search engines will primarily search social networks. Google believes it. In fact, it has staked the future of its core product on this idea. It is already ceding the control of its search results to a third-party: you and me, and the rest of the mob.

In my next article, I will discuss the technical steps for improving your Content Discovery Optimization—making it easier for people to share and find your books and content on their social networks. (Hint: Google+ is Google.) While it's less technical than SEO—at least for now—there are some steps you can take to get ahead of the game. BB