SEO is not dead, social media is not a replacement. Ignore SEO to your own detriment.<p>Real life example: My startup, DoLeaf (<a href="http://doleaf.com" rel="nofollow">http://doleaf.com</a>). 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.)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 It hasn't been replaced by social media, just augmented.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.