Future of Seo

Its a tough question since the search engine landscape changes very quickly.

As long as Google is still around and still focused on relevancy we will never have to worry about engines showing all ads all the time. Even if Google goes public and becomes the next in a long line of greedy search engines to totally screw up their results, another will come along to take its place. So, no, we will never have to worry about there being only paid listings.

Aside from that aspect, I do see a rather bleak future for traditional SEO in many senses. A few years ago, only a fraction of Web sites had even a rudimentary bit of optimization done to them. This made it easy for anyone with the slightest bit of SEO knowledge to come in and obtain some decent results. We also had many more options open to us because there was no one search engine that dominated the searches. If you didn't get high rankings in one engine, it wasn't always the end of the world; you could still get tons of traffic from the other engines.

Today, clients seem to be mostly interested in Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN. This limits the databases we have to work with. This makes the job of an SEO much harder, and more frustrating. It's just not as easy as it used to be to get high rankings. (I know I'm partly to blame since I've been teaching the average Joe Shmoe how to optimize for years, but deep down I know it's better for the Internet as a whole to have more sites optimized.) On top of that, clients are becoming more demanding because they're tired of spending huge amounts on PPC ad campaigns.

One thing that I know for sure is that client expectations will probably have to be somewhat lowered in the near future, if not already. Optimizing for longer phrases will become the norm, and if you want the most competitive phrases, there's a good chance you're going to have to buy them through ads.

The good news is that due to the difficulty in gaining high rankings these days, many SEOs are also focusing on other aspects of their clients' Web sites. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, even if you get high rankings for highly competitive keywords that bring tons of targeted traffic, if your Web site sucks, you still won't make any money off of it. Secondly, when you are required to focus on less general phrases, it forces you to really take a hard look at your site, and make sure it's truly working for you.

SEOs will need to take usability and conversions into consideration when coming up with your search engine marketing campaigns in the future, if they're not already doing this. Therefore, I see there being a much brighter future for those SEOs who are able to make the transition. Whether that means learning all that stuff themselves or partnering with those who do, it's gonna have to get done somehow. Since SEOs are generally the ones "fixing" broken sites, it makes sense for this to become part of their regular job description.
(source-www.searchengineguide.com)