The Art of SEO, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

An Evolving Art Form: The Future of SEO

As we have noted throughout this book, SEO is about leveraging your company’s assets through search engine–friendly content creation and website development (on-site) and targeted content promotion (off-site) in order to increase exposure and earn targeted traffic from organic search results. Therefore, the ultimate objective of the SEO professional is to make best use of organic search traffic as determined by various business goals of a website by guiding organizations through SEO strategy development, implementation, and ongoing measurement of SEO efforts.

This role will change as technology evolves, but the fundamental objectives will remain the same as long as “search engines” with nonpaid search results exist. The complexity of search will continue to grow, as all search engines seek to locate and index all of the world’s digital information. As a result, we expect various levels of expansion and evolution in search within the following areas:

• Continued rapid expansion of mobile search, and with it, voice search, as the world continues to increase its demand for this capability.

• Large-scale investments in improved understanding of entities and relationships (semantic search) to allow search to directly answer more and more questions.

• Growth in 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 ...