Rumor has it that SEO is dead.  I suppose you could say the old way of doing SEO is most certainly guaranteed not to work -- no more keyword stuffing or irrelevant content, which will likely get you tossed to the bottom of search results instead of where you want to be, which is on the first page.

However, I would say that the death knell for SEO is a bit premature if you define it the way we do:  being smart about how you develop your content so that it is naturally attractive to search engines because it is attractive to the people searching for your area of expertise.

Earlier today, there was a post over at Hubspot.com with an infographic that lists 13 copywriting rules for obtaining better search rank results.  None of these, you will note, are aimed at “gaming” Google’s system -- rather, they are helpful in understanding the type of content that Google rewards.  We all need to know that.

For example, keywords are still important since they indicate the subject matter you are writing about, which Google uses to link your content to searches using those same words.  But the watchword here is “natural” -- you need to use your keywords in your content naturally, and sprinkle in some synonyms or related keywords that can expose your content to different search queries.

A hat tip to ContentVerve.com and atcore for aggregating this information: