Is SEO just a trend of the times?

No.

You don't need a blog, just knowledge.

I just finished reading an article over at Traffic and Conversion about why a blog can increase traffic to your website.

Upon finishing the article, I laughed.

In the said article, Mark Widawer claims that a blog is “critical to your traffic work.” Critical to gaining traffic? No. Not true. A blog is not critical to gaining traffic to your website.

The reason blogs are so favorable among SEOs is because blogs make it easy to optimize websites. In-fact, blogs come pre-optimized for search engines; and search engines favor blogs because they are always new and often influential.

But you don't NEED a blog. Especially if you have knowledge of XHTML and CSS.

All a blog does is plugs in META tags, and makes it easy to constantly update content on your website. But if you can do that on your own, there's no reason to have a blog at all.

That's right, I said it: YOU DON'T NEED A BLOG!

I would even go so far to say that it would be better NOT to have a blog for your website. Would it be harder to update? Definitely. Do you need to already have knowledge of web programming and SEO if you're not going to use a blog? Absolutely. But do you NEED blog? No.

The reason SEOs promote blogs is because blogs make SEO easy.

That's it.