Future Prediction for SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and the search engine policies which affect it, have gone through a number of changes in the past several years. Keyword META tags became less important, Google changed its policy on paid and reciprocal links, and the number of major search engines reduced to about four, while various practices like “Google bombing” came and went. What are some predictions for the possible future of SEO?
- Increasing search engine restrictions upon what defines “acceptable” links (which are useful for SEO purposes), along with widespread use of the “nofollow” tag, will make it more difficult and expensive for new websites to reach a substantial audience, in the near future.
- Search engines will eventually upgrade their “spiders” so that they can navigate more kinds of websites, possibly including the major types of animated menu systems. At present, “spiders” only follow text-based links when looking for the individual pages of a site.
- Websites won’t have to pay search engines as much for PPC listings when their regular rankings for keywords improve; PPC links aren’t as valuable if the same site already appears on the first page of unpaid results. This would additionally promote SEO as an effective way to reduce websites’ PPC costs.
- Metasearch engines like Search.com, Dogpile, Info.com, and Webcrawler will gain popularity in the future, thus additionally increasing the value of getting listed in the Open Directory Project (often used in metasearches) and promoting more SEO work aimed at optimizing for engines other than Google.
- There are over 168 million websites (according to netcraft.com). As this number continues to increase in the future, highly-specific original content will become even more important to achieving success on the internet, and it will need search engine optimization to have much chance of reaching a substantial audience.
- More engines will start to integrate “social” features into their search results, like rating, voting, or even commenting upon individual results. As part of SEO, it will become more important to make sure page titles and descriptions are likely to produce realistic expectations and satisfied users.
- If Microsoft does acquire Yahoo at some time in the future, it will be in more of a position to dictate acceptable SEO practices as Google occasionally does. With the combined market share of Yahoo, MSN, and the smaller engines they provide results for, their SEO related policies would be difficult to ignore.
Comments are closed.