What Is Waiting for Us? Tomorrows SEO Industry


Today, SEO is swiftly approaching saturation point. More and more webmasters realise the necessity of learning SEO basics, and as they do so, SEO professionals are facing difficulties finding new clients. With all the niche sites optimised, it will be harder to compete for good key phrases. Link building opportunities will be easily found and utilised by everyone, keyword density will reach its optimum value, meaning that the SERPs will consist of equally good and equally relevant sites - at least from the traditional SEO point of view.

Spammy techniques, still popular and sometimes even effective, will exhaust themselves even quicker. There are, really, not so many different methods of deceiving the search engines and increasing a site's relevancy artificially; today they just differ in details. Perhaps it explains why we don't see spammy sites in the SERPs as often as we used to - our smart spiders catch them quite soon and throw this low-rate stuff away to keep the web cleaner. As soon as spiders become smart enough to recognise spam on the fly, the particular class of "SEO specialists" propagating such rubbish will find themselves out of their jobs. It is not really hard to tell an ugly doorway from the real thing.

So who will survive? What is the way to tomorrow in SEO science?

First of all, we should monitor and analyse the latest tendencies, then extrapolate them and make good guesses on how things may look in the future. Finally, we put them to test using logic and common sense.

This will show us the true answers and help us compete when the time comes to offering ground-breaking SEO services that exploit the new qualities of search engines.

And common sense tells us that the core purpose of the search engines will never change. They are supposed to deliver the best results they can. If they are not always so good at it today, it is often explained by their restricted resources; but that will change over time.

The search engines of the future will be capable of reading JavaScript, CSS, Flash and other things that are invisible to them now. It is technically possible already, but requires more complicated algorithms and more bandwidth, so they are not so eager to implement it just yet. They prefer to sacrifice additional capabilities in favour of spiders' speed and the freshness of their indices. But as the technical factors improve, SEs will improve and create new sensations every day, all the more so since they always have to compete with each other.

Thus, JavaScript links will count. CSS spam will be easily detected and banned. Flash sites will become a new niche for SEO specialists - at the moment they require an HTML version to subject to search engine optimisation.

But these changes are not the most important ones. Link popularity analysis algorithms are sure to become more sophisticated - and capable of analysing the "likeliness" of one or another link pattern given the information on a site's age, size and content. That will mean death to link schemes, link farms, pyramids, automated submissions, and numerous links with the same anchor text - and, perhaps, shake the basis of the today's reciprocal linking strategies. Relevancy will mean more, and in cases