SEO Will Never Die

There is contstant talk of SEO dying...but it never will.

In years past, there have been many people who have predicted that SEO would be dead by now. Many others think SEO is dying out as I write this. I really hope these people didn't quit their SEO jobs and get into a career that has anything to do with forecasting. At this point in time, SEO is as alive and well as it has ever been. But this post isn't about what's going on now. It's about the future of SEO and why it will never die…that's right…never!

In order to explain this, you need to understand the value of search engines. If you were looking to buy the book Vita di Alberto Pisani by Carlo Dossi in Italian, and you didn't have the internet, how would you find and purchase it? Accomplishing this task would be incredibly difficult and take days, if not weeks or months to complete. Now how would you accomplish this same task with the internet as a tool? Amazon? Google? Ebay? Regardless of how you find it, I can almost guarantee you would use a search engine and you will find it within minutes, if not seconds.

My point is that as we see an exponential growth in information, we will see a similar growth for the need of high quality search engines that can sort through the millions of pages of content and give you what you are looking for. Therefore, search engines will never die. Now that I've done some sufficient marketing for the search engines, I'm going to expose their two big secrets:

First, search engines are not perfect and they never will be. They will continue to improve and become more relevant, but I don't believe they will ever be able to serve up 100% relevant results to every user 100% of the time. There are simply too many variables, including human behavior and search intent that cannot be mathematically factored into an algorithm. One quick example: if I am a developer and do a search on “Java”, Google will serve me results about the Java programming language where someone else may get the results for Java the drink. While it is incredible that Google can do this, what about the programmer who one day does a search for Java and is instead looking for a cup of coffee?

The second secret about the search engines is that they need SEOs and they always will. I'm not talking about black hat SEOs who use manipulative tactics to get irrelevant results to rank higher in the search engines. I'm talking about SEOs who help sites to abide by search engine policies and create and serve up clean, compelling, and relevant content. The search engines can't do that themselves. They need people to do that for them and they always will.

Some people believe what I am describing here is not SEO, and that SEO is only link building, changing title tags, code clean-up, etc. I would strongly disagree. Those are simply the current SEO tactics. Like hundreds of other tactics, each of these may eventually disappear and be replaced by new tactics, but the practice of SEO will never die. As long as search engines are around—and they always will be—search engine optimization will be around.

So, to all those who are restlessly anticipating the death of SEO, I use the words of the grim reaper: “Face it guys…SEO isn't coming.”