The Future of Search Technology and SEO
Google CEO Eric Schmidt feels that search technology and Search Engines (specifically Google) will continue to develop until the most definitive search results are displayed in response to user’s search queries. Google will develop itself in a way that users needn’t look into other sites and search engines for more appropriate results.
In today’s scenario, if you enter a search query into Google, it will give you a list of sites wherein you might find an answer to your question. Eric Schmidt envisions that in the near future Google will display search results that will have the answer to your question. As it is Google is doing an increasingly good job at this, but in the near future you wouldn’t have to look for a needle in a haystack. The needle will be served to you almost every time you’re looking for it.
Such major changes are not going to occur overnight, it’s going to take at least a couple of years for Google and the other search engines to move in that direction. Schmidt himself feels it should take at least another ten years.
Bing from the Microsoft stable has already taken a step in this direction. It has started displaying page previews as pop-ups on the right side of the search results page. The preview contains prominent text from the page.
The Future of SEO
With the search engines evolving fast, SEO would have a more important role to play in deciding the fate of a site. The current parameters are definitely going to change for good. Most search engines including Google display sites with most relevant, related and maximum keywords. Incoming links from other sites are also taken into consideration. The problem is, not all sites with relevant keywords have the relevant information. A tricky SEO job can fool the search bots and spiders into considering them the most authentic source of information, which is often not the case.
As the search engines continue to evolve stress will be more on natural depth of content and organic links. It’s fairly safe to say that such change of parameters will result in stiffer competition. You’d have to have the most relevant content, the most SEO friendly design, the most aggressive promotion and the best SEO techniques to rank better on the search engines.
A site wouldn’t rank well based solely on SEO techniques, but its overall merit. We’ve already witnessed the change. Link building and link farms were popular buzzwords even a couple of years back. Such things don’t work anymore. A site might even get penalized by Google for trying to buy or exchange links the old fashioned way.