Is SEO going to die?

Filed Under WEB 2.0

These days there’s a lot of talk about the slow but steady decrease in importance of the whole SEO phenomenon in the search engine world. So, the question on everyone’s lips is: Is SEO going to die?
The answer, no.
The discussion must first start with spam, because that’s the main reason why something needed to change. Search engines play a key role in a site’s traffic and that implies that Google’s or Yahoo’s or …’s job is to continuously try to give the user the best results possible. The strategy they were relying on was to measure the number of links and also the quantity and quality of keywords, but all these can be easily faked. There are tons of Black-Hat techniques out there (if you’re really looking for hardcore dummy content, checkout website generators and stuff like that), but that’s beyond the purpose of this analysis.
The new player in the scene now is social voting. A human, for now, does a way better job than a machine on mapping good/bad content. We have entered the social network era and I think it’s here to stay.
The only problem with social ranking is that that would mean relying too much on large information-aggregators, such as Digg, Technorati, etc., or large networking sites, such as MySpace, Facebook, etc. and that’s not a very good idea.
What Google and others (each with it’s respective tools) are probably trying to do is to give a greater importance on the feedback they receive from web-analytics, and especially from AdWords (why AdWords? Because every spammer needs advertisements to make money). One very important aspect I can think of is the average time spent on site. This combined with smart dictionaries of key phrases will definitely pay off.
Google toolbar is a nice addition to all that, gathering important feedback directly from the source ;).
Stepping back to the initial problem, SEO is not going to die and that is because SEO, at it’s core, means organizing and displaying the information on a site in a structured, user-friendly and best-practices way. If I have to choose between 2 sites with the exact same content, I’ll pick the one which looks nicer and is easier to use.
Of course, search engines won’t rely so much on subtle aspects of the outputted HTML code, but that’s ok, it will leave more time on the SEO experts to focus on the content arrangement and display. No matter what, the end-user will have the final word in this, and the job of making a site look and feel better will always exist.
In the end, Black SEO will eventually die, but rest assure, the spammer game is not over.