Recently I’ve encountered a number of articles discussing the SEO business and how the era of SE optimization is coming to its end. Particularly these two articles attracted my attention: ‘Is SEO a dying industry?’ and ‘SEO has no future’.

The main idea behind these blog posts is that within 2 years or so Google will completely change it’s algorithm in favor of ‘social voting’ based on data obtained from Google Toolbar, user history and Google social networks. No more Meta tag key word staffing and title tag optimization so to say. All will be left for the users to decide whether your site is valuable or not.

Now, I would like to disagree with this. In my opinion, the outdated ‘White Hat’ SEO techniques like Meta tag and description optimization, KeyWord stuffing, aggressive link building, etc etc. will certainly take you nowhere. These techniques have been spotted by search engines long ago and some of them are already considered ‘Black Hat’. Now there is no doubt that the so-called ‘Black Hat’ SEO is already dead. Doorways, cloaking, frame sets, hidden keywords and other bull poop bring 0.5% valuable traffic and get you only some 15 minutes of fame (perhaps I am slightly exaggerating here, no offence, Black Hatters. But for the most part this is true).

I believe that the essential SEO will still be compulsory for many years to come however it will not be enough to promote your business online. In fact today pure and conservative SEO efforts aren’t everything either, nevertheless they serve in favor of long term stability and SE presence.

As well as the authors of the articles mentioned above I believe that Internet will be changing and becoming more… more Web 2.0 or something… Which means that Google and others will be paying more and more attention to the ‘social voting’ system (which by the way can also be manipulated), content will become King again and you will need to provide more incentives in form of usability and interactivity so that people would link to your site (create your Brand awareness and loyalty). The interactive elements such as widgets, Flash and Java elements, AJAX, podcasts, etc. will most probably become ‘indexable’ at some point and .. BUM!.. Here we go with the need for SEO again!

Basically what I’ve just descried is already called Web 2.0 SEO. Internet will change, search engine algorithms will change, and SEO will evolve as well. May be at some point it will become more like Hi-Tech Marketing (more of a Marketing and less of a Hi-tech than it is now).

But anyhow this should be more fun than writing accurate Title tags!:)

Related posts:

1. Black Hat SEO and Why It is Not So Black Hat