The Art of SEO, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14. An Evolving Art Form: The Future of SEO

As we have noted throughout this book, SEO is about obtaining new customers. Therefore, the role of the SEO professional is to bring more targeted traffic to an organization’s website. This underlying role will not change as technology evolves, but the mechanics of how it is done will continue to evolve as technology improves and adapts to users, and vice versa. Driving this is the fact that the complexity of search will continue to grow, as all search engines (not simply Google!) seek to locate and index all of the world’s digital information. It is reasonable, then, to expect various levels of expansion and evolution in the following areas:

• Mobile search, and with it voice search, as the world continues to increase its demand for this capability

• Social search, as users begin to leverage social networks to discover new and interesting content and solutions to problems from their friends

• Indexation of multimedia content, such as images, video, and audio, including a better understanding of the content of these types of files

• Indexing of data behind forms (something that Google already does in some cases)

• Extraction and analysis of Flash, JavaScript, and AJAX-based content

• Localization of search

• Personalization capabilities

Mobile search is already driving an increasing demand for linguistic user interfaces, including voice recognition–based search. In October 2011, Apple released the iPhone 4S with Siri, an “intelligent personal assistant” ...