Is there a future for SEO?
Jeff Jarvis asks this question while noting that continuos improvements to Google’s algorithm is making traditional SEO less and less relevant to the ordinary user.
The question is quite interesting. Today there’s a ton of money in SEO, and as a result of that a lot of companies have specialized deeply in this space. It’s hard to imagine that that would suddenly go away. It certainly won’t happen tomorrow.
However, eventually I think it will evolve into something quite different. It will be more about advising companies on how to adapt for semantic search engines, people search, photo search etc. than about doing actually work on meta data. For the simple reason that relevancy in search engines will be more about the people actually using the services and recommending it to others than on true algorithms alone.
I think this would be a good move for SEO. SEO today is a continuation of the industrial consumer society, where it’s all in the end about gaming someone into buying your product. I have a strong feeling that the future will be less about gaming things and more about real strong relationships.
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3 comments
I must disagree with you - at least when it comes to the European and in particular the Danish market. More or less half new launched sites are so poorly made “SEO friendly” that it takes a lot of work to make them crawlable.
I’ve been a pro-SEO since 2000 and today more and more of my time is spend in cooperation with CMS and shop developers. And link building of course.
The very basics of making a web site SEO (bot) friendly seems unknown to the vast majority of programmers.
Summasummarum: I look at the future with great confidence
It a business constantly on the move - developing and embrasing new methods etc. For those who dare and have the knowledge there is a great future for SEO. It will be a different kind of SEO in five years from now. As SEO today is very different from five years ago.
I don’t see us disagreeing much on this one, Thomas. I state quite clear that it won’t go away today or tomorrow, but that it will change over time. It seems like, you’re saying the same :-). With this being said I still hope that the future of SEO will be less about gaming the algorithms and drive, what I believe to be an unhealthy consumer mentality, and more about driving real relationships with users.
OK - we do agree! The buzz about the future of SEO has been going on for several month now in the international blogs - with pretty much the same result: There will always be SEO but it will change as it has always been.
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