Will SEO evolve? Will SEO die or be obsolete?
SEO age, part 1
How will SEO evolve? Will SEO die? Will SEO Become Obsolete?
All these questions and many others related to SEO field are popping up everyehere... and the short answer is that SEO will evolve, SEO will NOT die and so it will not be obsolete! ;-)
As other web fields the change rate will be faster and the SEO work done by one single guy will be done by more people, in the near future. We can already see this happening and new professional figures are coming.... But let's cover the full SEO story in short and deep.
The beginning of the SEO
After first search engines appeared (Aliweb and the most successful Jumpstation 1993) SEO was born too! SEO people were developers of these first search engines who wanted content to be found! And this is the essence of a SEO! He wants content to be found! So, at the very beginning, SEO were just developers who wanted content to be found.
Used Seo techniques.
just write some content and add your web site to search engines.
Required skills.
None in particular.
The SEO stone age (SEO SPAM begins here!)
From 1994 to 2000 many search engines were born, like Lycos ('94), Excite ('95), Inktomi ('96),Yandex ('97), Google ('98), Vivisimo ('99), Baidu (2000) and many others. We can think about these years as a "SEO stone age" because you could do whatever you want... and it worked. Keyword stuffing everywhere, hidden text, doorway pages, cloaking. Sadly SEO SPAM started during these years and here black hat SEO have their roots.
By the way, many of today ethical / white hat / gray biggest SEO comes straight from the old black hat school. They were wise and opened mind and understood that messing up pages could not last forever. In these period SEO people learned that 'testing' was the only way to do some reverse engeneering in search engine algorithms.
Used Seo techniques.
Basic Black Hat techniques like keyword stuffing, hidden text, doorway pages, cloaking, link farm.
required skills.
Good HTML and some programming knowledge is the "minimum requirements" to dominate SERPS.
The Modern SEO age (2001-2008) or Google age!
The exponential growth of web content (among all blogs content) starts to cut some search engines who can not offer valuable content searches. SEOs become always wiser and in these years SEO become a professional work. The smarter SEOs started reading 'search engine patents', and search engines recommendations.. because it was clear that old black techniques would have had a short life since search engines were fixing what we can call search algorithm bugs.
This is the age where "content is the king", both for quality of meaning and quality of HTML code, clean url. During these years cloaking, doorways pages, hidden content start to be unuseful and sometimes dangerous, because the web site can be banned from the SERP. There are some smarter method but they sometimes work and sometimes not beacuse search engines evolves fast and above all, a SEO competitor can suggest them you're cheating!
Google dominates above all other search engines in the 2008 but.. something new is happening. Social network exploding can bring an unexpected competitor to search engines to drive traffic to websites.
Used Seo techniques.
Semantic HTML -just the minimu you can do with html4-, clean url, great great content to get incoming links, linking strategies..and some fine gray techniques...
required skills.
Strong HTML / CSS / XML knowledge, good/great programming knowledge and copywriting capabilites are the "minimum requirements" to dominate SERPS. A plus is the capability to understand and use what search engines patents reveal. So it is just too work for one single 7-8 hour worker... ;-)
{second and lasting part about "SEO ages"}