Hey Guys,

There has been a lot of talk recently about the Future of SEO, there has always been the “SEO is dead/going to die” side of discussions which obviously we don’t agree with, i’ve never seen a half compelling argument for this and while ever search exist search optimisation will be needed.

This isn’t to say changes are in store however, Rand did a post Friday over at SEOMoz looking at his opinion of the future of SEO and I thought I would give my professional response to Rand’s ideas as well as some of my own.

Here’s the video for you to watch first, it’s less than 10 minutes long so don’t worry about a lecture.

Let’s look at the points Rand raises first.

Content and Accessibility will Remain Important

I am confident Rand is right about this one. Controlling quality ocntent and managing site accessability is one of the most important roles in SEO, increasingly websites are become very large and complex and it takes a lot of time, planning and expierence to correctly structure sites and keep them accessible to everyone (and bots).

As new trends develop site maintenance will become a larger task and things such as semantic tagging (not LSI) more advanced sitemaps and robots control will be important.

Content will remain an important part of SEO but I expect we will begin to see a more vaired base of content being important. The changes in the last year alone with Google now indexing Flash and Java has shown SEO’s we don’t just have plain text to play with. This technology will only become more capable and accurate meaning web technologies like Flash much more accepted by SEO.

As Rand mentions this has to be an important part of SEO as it’s an imoprtant part of internet marketing in general and the future of the web.

Social Graph Metrics

Rand moves on to discuss social graph metrics and the potential impact it will have on search. Again I agree with Rand on this one on the basic point that it will be something search giants are interested in but the overall effect on queries and results will be small.

The value in presenting people with “super personalised” results is minimal and just like in Rand’s example you are not always going to want to see the thing people around you are talking about top of the SERPs. Rand is also correct in the fact the system is too easy to game, if SE relied solely on community interaction to predict what people want in the SERPs quality would plummet for both them and the communiteis themselves.

I personally see this evolving more as a supplementary search option, similar to “images” or “video” a section almost themed “what my peers think” is a possibility. I’m not sure how this will be presented but i’m confident it will not encrouch into the main algorythm.

User Metrics

User Metrics is more of a complicated point. There are a lot of theories stating these already have an impact on ranking. Rand suggests that they will be incorporated into SEO and ranking algorithms more in the future.

I think while this makes sense and it is likely Google will use Analytics data to influence rankings it will never be a major factor for one reason, not everyone use analytics.

It would be impossible for Google to sort out all the websites into ranked order if only 30-40% are giving the the data they need. It would also mean that “having analytics” would give you a statistical advantage or disadvantage in the SERPS (depending on your site and how they work it) and therefore people would have alternative motives to using it.

User metrics can be valuable however and I think that in the long run you may at least start to get WMT feedback on issues that can harm site rankings.

Verticalis

The major point Rand ends on is the concept of verticals developing in the SEO world or at least becoming much more prominent.

This is something a lot of people in our office have been discussing recently, we are increasingly seeing people waver away from Google on long tail industry specific searches and move to websites that are almost guaranteed to answer their query.

This means that businesses are now wanting to appear in new searches, not just Google, Yahoo and Bing. With this new trend developing it easy to see that it will become competitive however I am sceptical at how much some of these sites can actually have optimisation done for them. Many work on exact matching or showing the oldest/newest entries and you can’t actually do much about the way it brings results back.

Of course manipulating titles and putting the right “tags” will have positive effects but each site is it’s own ball game and it could become very hectic very fast.

There is also Googles reaction to consider. They are not going to let all those searches go without a fight and with there increased range of search projects (such as books, base, etc) will be challenging people for these customers.

Conclusion

SEO is going through a lot of changes at the moment, we can expect the next year to be a very interesting time for everyone in the search marketing industry but the practice is far from dead and is actually growing way beyond the “search engine” barrier to become just “search”.