SEO Has A Future

This morning I routinely went on Sphinn to check out the hottest news and ideas in the search marketing industry, and was amazed to see no less than 4 most popular items on the homepage talking about Shoemaker’s “SEO has no future” comment and a similar statement from Marketing Pilgrim’s Greg Howlett. Am I surprised about the reaction? Not really, and I believe most SEOs would disagree with that the “no future” statement as well. So here’s my thoughts on this whole concept, as usual, with an in-house spin on it.

For starter, I’m not in total disagreement with Shoe’s statement that Google is constantly changing and it affects how SEO conduct their business, but I do not believe the SEO industry will die as a result. It is apparent that Google has always tried to improve (or worsen, depend on which side you are on) its algorithm by utilizing traffic data and user behavioural statistic to influence the ranking, but changes and evolution have always been a constant in the search engine and SEO industries.

We have adapted to the rise and fall of various search engines, and learned to change our tactics to optimize our sites as the search engines secretly changed their algorithm. There’s no reason to believe that the addition of some human factors in the algorithm would break the SEO industry apart, because SEO is more than just modifying page titles and meta descriptions, generating links and optimizing anchor texts. It’s about helping other key stakeholders in the company, be it the developers, writers, UI designers or middle managers, to create the best user experience with high quality content and user friendly interface to the human users without having to suffer from search engine ranking setbacks.

From an in-house perspective, companies that could afford to pay for an in-house SEO specialist will continue to do so as search engines will continue to be one of major traffic sources in the near future. Compared to other online marketing vehicles like banner advertising, search engine marketing still gets the most bang out of the buck in providing both long and short term traffic, conversion and brand visibility. SEO contributes to the overall marketing function, the same way as public relations, advertising, sales and promotions all provide contribution to the big marketing plan.

Until we stop using search engines and the importance of search engines fades into the abyss, I do not see the search engine optimization industry disappearing any time soon.