Where Will SEO be in 5 years?

SEO has grown into an industry that is quite large. Search engines give the path to find what you are looking for with ease. Technology has grown, and has become so simplified that anyone can be on the Internet, from virtually anywhere. This is what drives the business of SEO. Since the Internet is so rich with users, many different businesses, individuals, and service providers are competing to obtain this traffic. There are many ways to get traffic, but the easiest way is naturally through search. By ranking high in the search engine results pages for certain keywords, you are essentially getting the best advertisement you could possibly have, for free. Because search is dominated by Google so heavily, this makes SEO services very valuable. Most SEO companies try to provide services based on the premise of legitimacy, and white hat services. The lucrative business has brought some who treat the process as a scam – they provide very little quality work, and spam the Internet with senseless material. This effectively has search engines, and google in particular performing algorithmic updates to weed out the bad, and keep in the good. In turn, this has a lot of SEO’s worried about where the industry is heading, and how their business will survive in such a dynamic environment. So the pressing question at hand and what needs to be determined is where SEO will be in the next 5 years.

To start off, the future has search engines not going anywhere, and not anytime soon. As long as a company like Google, Bing, or Yahoo exist, then websites will need to optimize their sites accordingly. Search and recovery is still the best way to prospectively browse various websites, and retrieve information. Another concept may emerge, but there are no signs that search will go away. Something that may happen is a new search engine emerging, or Google losing some of it’s huge market share. Here and in the now Google is the main focus of SEO because they hold such an overwhelming market share. However many are getting fed up with Google producing increasingly large advertisements, and having subsidiary companies that they run, rank for first for a number of different keyword combinations. It is making it increasingly hard to rank for some niche, or group of keywords. Google has strayed far from the search engine they once were, claiming that search engines influenced by profits will be biased, and have tainted search results. It’s not hard to see that Google is a profit driven company, and they seem to be dipping their fingers into any company they can get their hands on. A new search, or a search that can provide a better means of information retrieval, could highly influence the SEO world.

In my opinion a more competitive search engine market, will lead to bigger SEO companies, that could perhaps even become household names. Right now search is still being figured out, so a service that constantly changes is not appealing to the masses, and leaves room for bad practice or broken promises. A competitive search market makes SEO more valuable, and the extreme changes that Google likes to make will hold less weight if they are not so dominate in the search market. In turn, SEO companies will have to stand by, and take on clients that they feel hold some weight, and deliver something of quality. The best SEO companies theoretically should do this, and charge a premium, as opposed to nickel and dime’ing their business. This creates big players in the industry. On top of that, for a company that isn’t a “brand name” looking to gain some headway, this can be a perfect way to assess what kind of quality they actually have. If an SEO company takes them on for work, then the must believe in their message, product, service, etc. Performing services for quality websites will be the most important aspect of SEO in 5 years.

The services that SEO’s will provide will most likely stay similar to what they are now. One thing that will most likely change is the way services are provided. This means, that in the future, SEO’s will only provide services to those who are deemed worthy. Meaning that, if you have a website that is recycled or spammed content, SEO’s will not work for you – or at least they shouldn’t. They will not be able to afford this, and most likely wouldn’t want to. Quality content, and websites come first – SEO comes second. For those who implement SEO before producing quality content, those services will most likely be weeded out by algorithmic updates. Spam sites looking to link to other sites will also have a harder time doing so because of this. Google based it’s search on backlinks from others websites to another in the beginning. Linking was around before it was part of search as a way to direct users to viable content. So there is no question in my mind that a premium white hat link building service will still be around. The thing that will change is that links that are not relevant, or are surrounded by irrelevant content will be subjected to being viewed differently by search bots. This is not necessarily a bad thing at all. This means that every quality link you have will act as both a SEO strengthening tool, and as an individual advertisement. After all, you essentially want users to click on your link, and gain some traffic from it. This will be the perfect way to do so, when it is surrounded by quality content.

Link building is one of the more controversial SEO tactics. Some are White Hat SEO and some are just not. Other services that SEO’s provide will have some changes too. In particular on-site SEO, will start to become more and more relevant with developing languages such as HTML 5 and CSS3. Google has even been working, quite secretly, on another language to take the place of Javascript as the web programming language. The future of web languages will continue to play a huge part in things like load times, and search bot’s ability to index pages. There is a lot of slopping coding out there, and as time progresses codes will have to be cleaned up, especially at the rate the web is growing. Search bots may even start ignoring sloppy coding, or frowned upon practices. Skilled web designers are going to play a role in SEO more so than they do now. In fact this is already starting to happen. Tags that HTML 5 has brought along like Header, Footer, Article, and Section are helping search bots index pages better, and the Div tag may even cease to exist in the near future. On-site SEO will play a huge role in the next 5 years.

SEO has come a long way over the past decade. As long as search exists, SEO will continue to be a service that needs to be provided. The future may seem unclear for some, but search isn’t going anywhere and therefore neither will SEO. The thing that will change is how services are given to clients. Quality SEO companies should only want to work with quality websites. Google is at the top now, but the shelf life for popular websites won’t last forever, as we have seen in the past – and especially since the internet is in it’s infancy. SEO will be around in 5 years, and it will be more complex, and more effective for those who have something of quality to offer. When this happens the search engine is happy, the website is happy, the SEO’s are happy, and most importantly the individual searching can find the best results out there.

This article was written by Ben Anderson. Ben has a very good understaning of proper SEO procedures, and constantly is working to share valuable information with web masters. He works with www.inetzeal.com, performing SEO services.

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