SEO is not dead, social media is not a replacement. Ignore SEO to your own detriment.
Real life example: My startup, DoLeaf (http://doleaf.com). We get the majority of our sales via SEO/Google. All we had to do to get there was to make sure to follow basic SEO guidelines (title tag, h1's, etc.)
People find us by searching on Google for very specific plants. They see a result that says "Buy XXX on DoLeaf". Click result, click checkout, done. Google sends high quality, high conversion traffic. Once we set it up, it required no further work on our part. Day and night, Google is sending us sales.
Contrast that to social media. Do we entice people to tweet about our plants? Add them to their Facebook profile? What? And how to do it? Successfully spinning up a viral loop is difficult to do and difficult to track. Finally, social media mentions grow stale pretty quick, so you've got to constantly feed that machine somehow to stay relevant.
We're not planning on ignoring social media, but you definitely should not ignore SEO. It hasn't been replaced by social media, just augmented. A different tool, a different purpose.
I've been thinking about the value of social sharing. Especially, quantity vs quality.
Broad social sharing ('quantity' AKA buzz, tweet, like, etc) returns little back to me. I've shared tons of links on twitter and essentially nobody says anything in return. But i check bit.ly (by adding a '+' to the url) and see some real use. I feel an obligation to only tweet interesting links for reputation purposes but it's not apparently rewarding.
Contrast forward to HN (quality). Far less traffic, but great community interaction with the content. For me, the discource here is more valuable. Heck, down voting my comments is really valuable feedback (notice how on twitter you never get someone replying back to you with "that tweet sucked" (exception being, you threaten their reputation). Thus, HN completely alters how i interact with content.
HN is only good at distributing certain things and we try to keep it unique here. For content creators, HN can be part of the social strategy but for content consumers on HN each comment seems more valuable than a retweet. Maybe that's why we are not tweeting links to HN discussions (things get less valuable in public).
Does the quality of the HN community hurt the potential quantity of links spreading virally?
Real life example: My startup, DoLeaf (http://doleaf.com). We get the majority of our sales via SEO/Google. All we had to do to get there was to make sure to follow basic SEO guidelines (title tag, h1's, etc.)
People find us by searching on Google for very specific plants. They see a result that says "Buy XXX on DoLeaf". Click result, click checkout, done. Google sends high quality, high conversion traffic. Once we set it up, it required no further work on our part. Day and night, Google is sending us sales.
Contrast that to social media. Do we entice people to tweet about our plants? Add them to their Facebook profile? What? And how to do it? Successfully spinning up a viral loop is difficult to do and difficult to track. Finally, social media mentions grow stale pretty quick, so you've got to constantly feed that machine somehow to stay relevant.
We're not planning on ignoring social media, but you definitely should not ignore SEO. It hasn't been replaced by social media, just augmented. A different tool, a different purpose.