The Art of SEO

Chapter 13. An Evolving Art Form: The Future of SEO

As we have noted throughout this book, SEO is about obtaining new customers. Therefore, the role of the SEO professional is to bring more targeted traffic to an organization’s website. This underlying role will not change as technology evolves, but the mechanics of how it is done will continue to change as technology improves and adapts to users, and vice versa. Driving this is the fact that the complexity of search will continue to grow, as all search engines, not simply Google, seek to locate and index all of the world’s digital information. It is reasonable, then, to expect various levels of expansion and evolution in the following areas:

• Indexation of multimedia content, such as video and audio

• Spidering of data behind certain types of forms (something that Google already does in some cases)

• Extraction and analysis of Flash and AJAX-based content

• Local search

• Dominance of mobile search, as the world begins to increase its demand for this capability

Looking a bit more into the future, one can also expect that mobile search will drive an increasing demand for linguistic user interfaces, including voice-recognition-based search. When these things will arrive is not easy to predict, but a lot of people are investing in the development of such technologies.

Business deals also regularly change the landscape. For example, on July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! signed a far-reaching deal that will result in Yahoo! retiring the search technology ...