Search Engine Optimization—SEO—is critical. Your content won’t influence anything if people can’t find it.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I have to ask: Does absolutely every nugget of online content need to be optimized for search?

I just finished delivering the morning keynote at a healthcare conference focusing on social media. During the Q&A, I was asked about the deleterious affect involvement in social media has on all the efforts of the marketing staff to ensure their content is well optimized.

I sat down after my talk, fired up my laptop, and checked Twitter to find a link to a WebProNews piece by Chris Crum titled, “Social Media Will Not Replace Search.” The piece digs into some Nielsen research. Crum says, “Your friends may not have all the answers you seek. Furthermore, if you are asking people you don’t know, why would you trust them any more than search results?”

A couple days ago, I read a SearchEngineWatch post by SEO PR’s Greg Jarboe, who dismissed the Social Media News Release (SMNR) because Google News doesn’t index them. My answer to Greg: Are cars a failure because they don’t fly? Flying is not something a car was ever designed to do, just as SEO was never a goal of the SMNR. While HubSpot’s research showed that distributed SMNRs don’t get indexed to the degree that traditional releases do, the goal of the SMNR is increased coverage by reporters and bloggers who will find the release either because they have been personally directed to it or they found the link in the traditional release or on the company’s website.

(Incidentally, my disagreement with Greg in the post’s comments has led to a new friendship. Disagreements don’t need to be confrontational or disagreeable.)

Search is important, but not everyone online is searching all the time. People don’t need to find the communities in which they already participate or the blogs they already read. If you create a widget that bloggers can embed in their own blogs to share with their readers, the widget itself produces no SEO benefits for your organization at all. Yet it creates visibility for your organization among readers of a blog who you want to reach.

Believe me, I’m not minimizing the importance of search. But how well content can be optimized, or whether it can be optmized at all, is not the only criteria for determining whether the content has value.