What is the future of SEO?

Answer 1

While content is king, some form of SEO will always be neccessary. This is evident in the constant tweaks and changes made by Google to their algorithim.

"Since someone who arrives in a search engine may not know it's user, there must be a baseline of assumptions that we can surmise out a first time visitor."

What would your baseline of assumptions be?

"I think what Google fails to get is that affiliate sites and self promotion sites will eventually fall out of circulation. They are not intrinsically marketable or useful to any visitor who needs answers, like those answers an actual product or service site can provide."

Google's whole business is not based on affiliate sites, but they would be stupid to leave out a growing and strong business model. While I will admit there are a lot of spam sites on all search engines (not just G), your assumption that affiliate sites are not "intrinsically marketable or useful" to any visitor is wrong. Affiliate marketing is inherently well-suited to the web, which explains why it continues to evolve.

Affiliate sites can help visitors by providing product reviews and suggestions. They can and typically do, provide more technical knowledge than some companies provide their own customers. An excellent example would be the XBOX 360. While Bill Gates and company deny any problems, small gaming sites (who make their revenue through Adsense and affiliate marketing) not only admit their is a problem, they give suggestions on how to prevent and/or correct the problem.

Answer 2

Hopefully some clever person will come up with a better solution than the current SEO models.

Do a search on anything using any popular search engine using a general search topic.

First page or second page will ALWAYS have AT LEAST one parking lot / affiliate sales portal site, a little bit of nothing for everyone and everything site, multiple pages from the same site, essentially dead sites (not updated in years), etc.

Niche sites that focus on a particular topic get buried somewhere around the 2millionth page by the BIGletMeTellYouEverythingAboutAnything.com
sites.

Quality is not necessarily and is often not equal to quantity.
Search engines seem to define quality as equal to quantity (number of links in, number of pages, number of times a word or phrase appears in the page or site). Ya know, sometimes, you really do only need to say KEYWORD-WHATEVER only once and doing so more often just detracts from the quality for your visitors.

Answer 3

Future of SEO is entirely depends on the people who are developing the websites.

May be google will create some new online tools to make the life of seo more easier.

Answer 4

Slowly it will die, natual death with age.

All search engines will try to market/sell and commercialize even this searching mechanism.

Even netizens will not know, if internally search engines have delas with sponsored results and show them as Natural/organic results.

--------------- Now coming to actuals -----------

Personalization feature has come up in search engines.
They collect your search patterns, keywords and track your clicks. This way search engines will know much of your historic data and try to present you customized results according to your past searches.

This way each person looking at search engine for a particular keyword will see very different results making SEO die. This is how i predict the future of SEO.

Answer 5

SEO Timeline:
1995 Create a content-rich, quality website. Use page titles.
1999 Create a content-rich, quality website. Use page titles.
2004 Create a content-rich, quality website. Use page titles.
2010 Create a content-rich, quality website. Use page titles.
2050 Create a content-rich, quality website. Use page titles.

Somewhat tongue in cheek -- read more on "content is king" to see why information (not "data") will outlive marketing.

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Editing for added thoughts...

The future of SEO may just exist in those engines (open market, no proof of market yet) who can accurately target users on their behaviors.

Since someone who arrives in a search engine may not know it's user, there must be a baseline of assumptions that we can surmise out a first time visitor.

I think what Google fails to get is that affiliate sites and self promotion sites will eventually fall out of circulation. They are not intrinsically marketable or useful to any visitor who needs answers, like those answers an actual product or service site can provide.

Answer 6

We need to think about search engines.
What do search engines do and want?
Basically, they want to show more accurate and relevant information to the Internet users when they search because all search engine companies want many people to use their search engines. Why? It is very simple! It is because more users are generating more advertisers who want to advertise their ads. In other words, search engines try to give better rankings to the site that has more relevant and useful information related to the Internet users’ searches. If you consider this basic principle, it will be easier for you to think about the future of SEO.

Thanks,

SEM Expertise – Search Engine Marketing Expertise such as Pay per Click Adverting and Search Engine Optimization

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http://www.SEMexpertise.com

Answer 7

The future of SEO.
http://www.ontheavenues.com/future-of-search-engines-1.html

Hmm...well, that's a tough one since the search engine landscape changes very quickly.

As long as Google is still around and still focused on relevancy we will never have to worry about engines showing all ads all the time. Even if Google goes public and becomes the next in a long line of greedy search engines to totally screw up their results, another will come along to take its place. So, no, we will never have to worry about there being only paid listings.

Aside from that aspect, I do see a rather bleak future for traditional SEO in many senses. A few years ago, only a fraction of Web sites had even a rudimentary bit of optimization done to them. This made it easy for anyone with the slightest bit of SEO knowledge to come in and obtain some decent results. We also had many more options open to us because there was no one search engine that dominated the searches. If you didn't get high rankings in one engine, it wasn't always the end of the world; you could still get tons of traffic from the other engines.

Today, clients seem to be mostly interested in Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN. This limits the databases we have to work with. This makes the job of an SEO much harder, and more frustrating. It's just not as easy as it used to be to get high rankings. (I know I'm partly to blame since I've been teaching the average Joe Shmoe how to optimize for years, but deep down I know it's better for the Internet as a whole to have more sites optimized.) On top of that, clients are becoming more demanding because they're tired of spending huge amounts on PPC ad campaigns.

One thing that I know for sure is that client expectations will probably have to be somewhat lowered in the near future, if not already. Optimizing for longer phrases will become the norm, and if you want the most competitive phrases, there's a good chance you're going to have to buy them through ads.

The good news is that due to the difficulty in gaining high rankings these days, many SEOs are also focusing on other aspects of their clients' Web sites. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, even if you get high rankings for highly competitive keywords that bring tons of targeted traffic, if your Web site sucks, you still won't make any money off of it. Secondly, when you are required to focus on less general phrases, it forces you to really take a hard look at your site, and make sure it's truly working for you.

SEOs will need to take usability and conversions into consideration when coming up with your search engine marketing campaigns in the future, if they're not already doing this. Therefore, I see there being a much brighter future for those SEOs who are able to make the transition. Whether that means learning all that stuff themselves or partnering with those who do, it's gonna have to get done somehow. Since SEOs are generally the ones "fixing" broken sites, it makes sense for this to become part of their regular job description.

#2. Stuffing Alt Tags.

Alt tags (technically called "image alt attributes") were definitely not designed to be stuffed with keywords. There's a good chance that your competitors may certainly be ranking highly despite their alt tags, as opposed to because of them.

I've recently done some quick tests to see if and when Google actually reads (indexes) the image alt attributes on any given page. Here's a summary of what I concluded:

a. It appears as if Google does *not* index the alt attribute keywords in non-clickable images.

b. Google can and does index the alt attribute words in clickable images, and will pull up the page that the graphic and alt attribute are on, in a search for those keywords.

c. Google *will* rank a page for keywords that *only* appear in an image alt attribute pointing to a specific page. The words don't have to be anywhere on the page that shows up in the search results, just in the alt tag of the image you'd click on to get to that page.

#3 My opinion on link popularity.

Well, since I'm running out of space here, let me just address your specific situation. Putting links *from* your site *to* other sites doesn't help your own link popularity, only the other sites' link popularity. Since it doesn't sound like something you want to do to enhance your visitors' experience on your site, I see it only as a detriment to you, as opposed to something that will help.

Not to mention that (if I remember my "Spam Police" session from the Search Engine Strategies conferences) hiding links in words like "but" or "the" would probably be considered spam by most of the search engines.

Summing up my opinion on link pop. is pretty easy: a) Create a site that is the best in its niche; b) Link to other relevant sites when it makes sense to do so and because your site visitors may be interested in them; and c) Submit your site to relevant, high-quality directories in your space.

Hope this helps!