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The SEO world feels somewhat messy and unsettled right now. This is natural as the concept of search is changing so rapidly. The emerging landscape of search will be very different than it is today and I suspect there is going to be a shake-down in the coming year in which many of the insto-seo shops that have proliferated in the past year will be forced out of a market they can no longer compete in. This is a sad reality from a human standpoint as many of these shops are honest SEO practices but the environment we work in is about to super-size very rapidly. Without a strong reputation and extraordinary references, the happy-go-lucky days of most micro-sized SEO boutique firms is unfortunately ending.

I don’t think organic SEO is dying however. Far from it in fact. The business sector is changing big-time but it will be a stronger, more professional industry for the change. The search engines will continue to need the organic listings and will have to continue to provide these listings free to the public. The organic listings are the “draw”, so to speak, just as the baseball players are the “draw” for stadium advertising. In the new world of SEO, Top10 placement will only be half the battle. The search marketplace is going to become a highly stratified and specialized arena with the real advantages going advertisers who can afford to harness the power of personalization across millions of search streams. Learn how to manipulate personalized results today and you will have work until the day you retire, at a relatively young age. A proficient understanding of localization, keyword enriched ad-copy and multi-platform SERPs will be as essential as understanding the similarities of HTM and CFM.

The growth of the Internet has often been likened to the settlement of the western US in the 1800′s. A similar analogy can be drawn for the evolution of the SEO/SEM industry. (note: In this story, the only indigenous culture was the military but they had pretty much left the environment by the time the SEO pioneers showed up.)

SEO, the Saga or, How the We(b)st was Won
(in this story, the We(b)st being the search engines)

First came the pioneers. Back in the days of AltaVista and Infoseek, keywords were powerful. A few enterprising techies decided to see if they could manipulate the results on search engines by messing with the keyword meta tags and found they could. An industry was born and the pioneers of the industry started their epic technical treks across the vast 1,000,000+ site indexes. Like the pioneers of the old west, some survived the journey and some got slaughtered along the way. They blazed a trail that thousands followed, leaving guidelines and business models behind to aid the fellow travelers behind them. One of these pioneers was the legendary Jim Wilson, founder of the JimWorld (now Virtual Promote) forums.

After the pioneers came the cowboy settlers. I think I was lucky enough to be in the first or second wave of cowboy settlers about six years ago. We staked out some great real estate before the space got too crowded and the search engines erected barbed wire across the open range. Even with the limitations of a barbed wired range, smart businesses survived and grew rapidly. This was around the time AltaVista, Lycos and Yahoo tried to re-invent themselves as infotainment portals and lost a lot of users fast. Infoseek, which many regard as the Google of its time, was purchased by Disney, turned into an other infotainment portal and quietly put to rest, much like Ol Yeller. Excite looked like it was going to become the dominant player in the industry stemming from their association with the failed @Home cable-isp. Search engines changed a lot during this period but the common denominator was always the organic listings and the absolute ease of manipulating those listings. Getting a Top10 placement as easy as opening a doorway page or networking a series of mini-doorway sites. When the search engines found a way to prevent one technique from working, the cowboys would ride forth and find another. It took about three years for the cowboy settlers to articulate SEO standards and “ethical” practices. Well known SEOs such as Bruce Clay and Doug Heil became volunteer ethics coaches in the industry, the former publishing a well adopted code of ethics, the latter creating the Best Practices SEO Forums. SEO related news sites and forums such as WebMasterWorld and WebProNews became populated with thousands of members, and the number of SEO practitioners began to grow quickly. News of the glorious riches of the wild we(b)st spread rapidly and the mainstream became very interested, bringing and end to the cowboys and settlers phase about two years ago and the beginning of the urban merchant phase.

Now that the forests are cleared, the environment mapped out, and the railroad has been laid, the we(b)st had been settled and the urban merchant SEO/SEM moved in. The urban merchant firms are almost entirely made up of good people who are just trying to grab a bit of whatever dream they believe in. They saw greener pastures over-yonder (here) and logically moved towards them. Along with the urban merchants however, come the snake-oil selling medicine shows. Snake-oil SEO appears to be everywhere. “I bought swamp-land” stories are easy enough to come by and a visit to the Las Vegas Better Business Bureau will give you an indication of how they poison us all. In reality, Snake-oil SEO is limited to a small number of persons of ill repute but stories of their spameo appearances tend to taint the entire industry like click-frauds on a Google.

Eventually, the frontier has filled up with so many SEO/SEM firms, the changing environment can not sustain them. Land is finite. Minerals and ranch land and access to water are all finite things. While it may seem to be not so, the we(b)st is a human created entity and it has finite boundaries. One of the more unpleasant boundaries is found at the bottom line, otherwise known as Main St. to one’s creditors. Another is called the Spam-line and though it is not a fixed boundary, it is real and crossing it has consequences. Some, who’s practices are more like cattle rustling than cat herding will find themselves in trouble with the law (whatever that may be in this context, law of karma perhaps). Remember how they dealt with cattle rustlers in the real wild west?

Along with Snake-oil peddlers come their hypesters. Think affiliate marketing and the millions of duplicate content sites out there. A lot of hypesters will get flattened in this shake-up as well. In-the-box SEO packages will be busted, along with link-farmers (fits the analogy eh?), affiliate dupe-content (we only need so many potato farmers), manipulative bloggers :( like me :), etc…

The point is, the we(b)st has been settled, the urbanites are covering the open ground with streets, shops, boutiques and RULES. The bankers, lawyers, and politicians have arrived and set up shop. The missionaries have been replaced by church hierarchy. A unique aspect life in the wild we(b)st is the rapidity of its evolution. It has taken one third of the time to reach this point in the society of cyberspace than it did to settle the American frontier in the late 1800′s. We live in a predicable society, even if it only exists in cyberspace. History happens and will happen again and again and again and again, ad infinitum.

Good SEOs will find the job market continues to be fruitful with direct and consulting contracts open at every smart business with a web-presence. As long as the free listings exist, and the SE’s still do need them, the SEO industry will continue to show growth (even if the number of practitioners decreases). The SEO/SEM industry is going to have to ride over a number of bumps in the next year though, the first of which will be a brutal process that will separate the wheat from the chaff and much of those chaffed will fall hard. (I may be waaaay off base on this one but that’s the way it looks to me today)

As an industry, I think we should stop thinking about what the search engines define as SPAM and start coming up with our own industry-specific definitions. I know how impossible this sounds but I think it is essential to the credibility of the sector and its ability to sustain so many practitioners.  Organizations like SEMPO are a good start, though I am pretty sure SEMPO has taken too many missteps and is not credible as long as Search Enigne reps sit as equals on the board. (they should be observers only, allowed to participate but not vote or speak for SEOs.) I am not going out of business by any extent. My professional life seems to be on a major upswing right now and I am way more excited than trepidations.

I anticipate good things for smart SEOs in the future. There is a lot we can do in a heck of a lot of emerging venues. I anticipate doom for chop-shop SEOs and the in-the-box crowd. The environment on the we(b)st is changing quickly. What we use today is a 9v. appliance battery compared to the power plant the web will be in a few short years.

I’m a cowboy settler. I’m gonna be ok no matter what happens, even if there are too damned many barbed wire fences across the previously open range. I know a few new SEOs I would also consider cowboy settlers, even though they are relatively new to the game. They’ll be ok too. Keep up with all trends and watch what happens to the new pioneers and be respectful of the environment (it is much bigger than any individual) and chances are, you’ll be ok too.