A friend, developer, writer, and fellow blogger of mine, Nicholas Roussos deems search engine optimization, or SEO, dead. I’d argue that it’s merely loosing relevancy but he raises some good points. From the article: “SEO is so Web 1.0. In it’s place is a new form of optimization I like to call Content Optimization. That’s Web 2.0. It’s about taking your content (in any media) and optimizing it so it reaches the largest audience of any type, whether it’s bloggers, the press, normal people, or even search engines.”

I’m all for retracting most of Google’s “search influence” through the use of content optimization for humans. I’d much rather get Digg’d or linked to from another social site on a consistent bases on a variety of topics that would lead to higher diversified traffic. I’ve personally benefited from manual link building, mass blog linking, and the “Digg effect” helping bring one of my sites from 0 to 2,500 daily visitors in under 5 months. The PageRank then took care of itself. Granted, that’s not huge, but I did it without a single spot on Google’s first 10 pages. Imagine if I did have a top place page, I know, but in “commodity content” I think it’s best spending your time optimizing your content. Content is the new… content!

Granted, my traffic success has been, for the most part, social based. But I know millionaires have been made either selling SEO, benefiting from it, or running it (cough, cough, Google). So what do you think? Is SEO dying?

See also: How Digg.com is Revolutionizing the News