first off SEO has had its demise predicted as early as 1997, and yet we as an industry have been going from strength to strength. i think what ALOT of people don’t get about SEO is that at the end of the day it is a function of a greater marketing strategy. let me repeat that again of a greater marketing strategy!

googles integration of tweets into the SERPs was done by google as they don’t want to be seen being outdone by bing as they were the first SE to integrate twitter results with their SE. also i’m of the belief that twitters results are going to start being throttled back simply because of how easy it is game it and spam the hell out of it – which also surprises me because after all of the efforts of the google spam team to lessen the effects of “black hat” techniques they’ve gone and created a whole new industry in one swoop. it is very nonsensical

i also find it amusing that you define SEO solely on a CMSs ability to produce SE friendly URLs – if that were true then i would be out of a job.

* what about crawlability
* and getting your site indexed,
* getting the crawlers to come back more often,
* correctly handling moved content and handling 404 errors?

the list is endless. especially when you looking at 10k+ page sites

one thing i do agree with you is linkbait. yes at the end of the day linkbait is primarily in the hands of the content producers, but once again this why i say SEO should be part of a greater strategy.

WRT to the guardian. if they aren’t happy with their number or visitors and ergo the “quality” of that traffic then you have to ask yourself the questions:

* is the traffic quality correct, are we getting the right sort of reader
* is a business model / conversion process correct.

i’ve always looked at facebook/twitter/myspace and other social media efforts from an seo perspective as providing the following:

* trust signaling
* social proof
* possible secondary links

all of which ultimately helps more with conversion process.

at the end of teh day it depends on your business and conversion model. if you are a blogger who likes to talk about your fluffy cat you don’t need to worry about SEO as ultimately you want to connect within the community of fluffy cat lovers. BUT as you start to look at commercial interests and you start moving up the monetary chain, and start moving into more and more competitive verticals and eventually within hyper competitive verticals like gambling, pharma goods, porn that sort of thing then every bit helps. especially since SEO has the highest ROI than any other marketing medium!

in closing i will say the following: where ever there is a SE there will be people trying to position their sites at the top of those sites.

Users are leaving, the site is doomed and used only by internet beginners, schoolchildren and older people who don’t understand the internet.

It’s quickly becoming the Myspace/Hotmail of social networking.

Don’t worry at all It will fail

Search have always been about comfort. The comfort not to have to find everything yourself by traversing the entire link tree that is the Internet, and the comfort of not having to save your useful links in some way or another. When you need it, just Google it.

There is, however, a level of comfort that traditional search do not provide, namely search term creativity. In traditional search, a search’s usefulness is directly proportional to the relevance of your search terms. On the contrary, by following the right people on social networks, you just have to filter. Information find its way to you without any input on your behalf.