Stoney deGeyter mirrors my ideas about SEO in a recent article on Search Engine Guide.

"This is why, as I stated in a previous article of mine, SEO is Dead, that those employing SEO from the old perspective based on keyword manipulation (on and off the page), without taking usability and other marketing aspects into consideration, are a dying breed. It simply doesn’t work. But even if it did, the point about not being able to convert visitors once they arrive is a valid one. Why pay to drive 10,000 visitors to your site if you can only convert .05%? Wouldn’t it be more lucrative to send only 5,000 visitors to your site and improve your conversion rate to 3%? Absolutely!

Many in the SEO industry are trying to move away from using rankings as the sole measure of success altogether. I applaud those efforts, and the points made are valid, but I often wonder if it is realistic. Most searchers don’t go past the first, second or third page of results, which means if you don’t have top rankings for your targeted phrases, you’re missing a considerable sum of traffic.

But as I said earlier, top rankings are not the only means to generate traffic. Good SEO can bring traffic from many avenues, not just the search engine. But is that still SEO? No, not in the strictest sense. Can other marketing efforts bring in just as much traffic as top search engine rankings can? Sometimes, but usually this results in a much higher cost.

So, are search engine rankings still important? Yes, rankings are still important, which means SEO is still important. But since SEO is more effective with usability and conversion tracking along with other online forms of marketing, the best SEO is that which offer more than just "top ranking" services.

I’m not even sure if rankings are that important anymore.  I think converting visitors is more important.