Fran Molloy of the Nett# magazine interviewed both myself, Kate Gamble and Glenn Murray a little while ago. The interview has been published and is available for you to read now. It’s called “The end of search engine optimisation”, I hope you find it interesting.
Do you think that it is the end of the rainbow for Seo?
I think that Seo is changing a lot and that it is going to be far more technical than it has been in the past (if we consider the semantic web and all the video material out there and so on). I also think that rather than thinking of Seo in isolation we need to be thinking more of it in the content of online marketing. Having a blog is important for a website for many different reasons and having all of those reasons interact makes for a sound result.
Who is the Seo of the future?
I think that there either won’t be one or that it will be a smart multi-tasker who can takes on a website as a whole. I don’t see rankings being around forever, and so your “Get to #1 in Google in 10 days” businesses won’t be valid (not that I recommend that business model – stay away from those!). There are a lot of brilliant SEO’s out there and they are the ones testing, learning, moving with the times. I see SEO becoming less and less manipulation and more preparation.
Technologies of the future SEO?
I think these might be for example:
- RDF / OWL (data linking on all data)
- Machine learning (more in depth statistics and predictions)
- Python (analysis tools)
I asked a few SEO’s and web pros what they thought:
“The seo of “tomorrow” will be an immensely powerful computer with a program that solves and corrects all SEO problems/questions” (Mel Nelson)
“There won’t be one” (Angie Haggstrom)
“The last gen turned guest books into blogs. The next gen will turn geocities into something huge.” (Disa Johnson)
“We are.” (Justin Parks)
“As long as there are search engines SEO’s have a job and place whether manipulating text is still a part of it who knows but content will likely always be done by humans and for that soomeone has to decide what that will be. It also depends on your definition of SEO. I distinguish between website promotion and SEO IMO, most don’t.” (Terry Van Horne)
“Who is the SEO of tomorrow? your mom, of course! (tooling should make SEO available to everybody…)” (@pabloduboue)
“I suppose we could ask, ‘Who is the search engineers of tomorrow?’ – as far as I am concerned as long as people are making them, people will be manipulating them. If you can make a learning algorithm that can reverse engineer the search engines ones – then people will still be involved. Not to mention much of SEO is marketing and I doubt that part will change. As the engineers evolve the engines, SEOs will evolve their tactics and be part of the mix” (David Harry)
“The SEO of tomorrow will tie together semantics, site architecture, traffic & conversion holistically – forswearing SEO as a silo.” (Aaron Bradley)
Where do you see SEO in the future and who is the SEO? Is he a scientist, a sociologist, a marketer, or is it anyone and everyone?
SEO is at the stone tool stage. When RDF and semantic repositories (RDF/OWL) and the like become more commonplace, it will be a substantial effort to make sure that ontologies don’t get poisoned or scammed. Who and what has access to them (should they be like Wiki’s?) should be a topic for discussion right now.