The Future of SEO: 3 Predictions

Most online businessowners have recognized that there is a tremendous market on the world wide web. The money to be made online is astonishing due to the sheer number of consumers that spend their time online, comparing products and actually purchasing goods and services. Because the primary means by which these consumers find product information is through the search engines, the practice of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is more important today than its ever been.

The current state of SEO can be summarized by a few basic points. The foundation of SEO right now is undoubtedly the backlink. The quality and relevance of those backlinks is crucial as well as just the sheer number of links. If you inspect the backlink profile of the top ranking sites for the most popular keywords, you can usually understand why one site ranks above another just by inspecting the quality of the backlinks that are pointing to the individual sites.

What about the future of SEO? What will search engine optimization look like 5 years from now? 10 years from now? Impossible to say of course, and there are billions of dollars at stake for whomever can figure out the answer first. In this article, I'll make a few speculations as to what SEO will look like some years down the line.

Social Networking

With the increased prevalence of spam and such, social validation will become more and more important. It's easy for someone to fabricate thousands of backlinks, but it is, ostensibly at least, more difficult to fabricate thousands of friends or "likes" on Facebook.

The movement has already begun, in fact. The search engine Bing has already announced that they will begin to incorporate Facebook likes into their search results, and Google has come out and publicly said that they take social networks into account when ranking sites.

The only problem with online social validation is that with enough time, this too is open to spam. There are plenty of services offering to "sell thousands of friends" to paying customers, and hiring a team of people to "Like" your services can be extremely cost-effective. It is up to the search engines to devise methods to guard against this.

Contextual backlinks

Since footer and sidebar links have also been heavily spammed, Google is paying more and more attention to contextual links. These are links that are included in the content of a site, rather than off to the side. In the future, it's possible that Google may count these links as more authoritative than other types of links.

Vertical SEO

Finally, one of the fastest-changing features of search engines like Google and Bing are their wide breadth of search results--images, maps, shopping, etc. In the future, professional SEOs will have to pay attention to the varying strategies to rank highly in all SEO platforms. A site that ranks high in the Image results can receive significant traffic just through image search.

Although the future of SEO is and always will be uncertain, by analyzing current trends and expert opinion, you and your business can always stay on top of the SEO game, and on top of the SEO dollar, as well.