Everyone’s talking about the hard times. Economically speaking, they’re getting rough. But does that change the name of the game? Is SEO out and social in? You’d think so with all of the talk about “getting social”.

Here are a few reasons you might think search engine optimization is old hat and social media marketing is where it’s at:

• Personalization


• Universal search


• Twitter


• Digg


• StumbleUpon


• 
  All the gurus are saying so

But I’d like to add that one of the most popular social tools online now still relies heavily on SEO. I’m talking about blogging. Sure, you have trackbacks, pings, comments, SezWho, Disqus, and all those fancy gadgets. But try to write a blog post without any attention to SEO and see what you get. Even if you rely on semantic language optimization you are still optimizing your content for search. I don’t think we’ll ever completely give up optimization even if we go totally social. Do you?