SEO News Blog

SEO is a dying art and I’m prepared to show you why with concrete evidence. The main reason? Search engine personalization. This may sound great and a relief that our SEs are improving everyday to show us more and more relevant results but for SEOs everywhere this is our nightmare come true. Recently Google made the first move by officially launching Google Personal Homepage. Though it was already being used by veteran Google users now it’s all over the public. With features that include your own homepage with you content from RSS feeds and such. But another feature called search result personalization is the one I am concerned about.

Barry at SE Roundtable was the first one to notice how different personalized SERPs and normal SERPs are. To the point where a top contender like Wikipedia was pushed down the ranks by Google because another website was more appropriate. Again Barry says he had never visited that website question, seochat.com, so why did Google push over a top result like Wikipedia for seochat? Who knows it’s all in the algorithm.

The point is that the more and more personalized search sweeps the web the less and still even lesser will SEO have to do with SERPs. As a matter of fact a nice prediction would be that b 2010 just about every search engine will have made their personalized page the homepage giving new users and old users little to no choice but to use the personalized SERPs. Leaving SEO powerless as users will be the ones choosing which websites benefit them the most.

Which brings me to my point why YOU need to leave the SEO field and join a more promising field such as SEM or Search Engine Marketing. Which is the art of making SERPs that are most appealing to users. usually this is used for PPC ads on search engines but sometimes it’s for SERPs. With a good looking SERPs it will prompt the user to click on your SERP. Which in the grand scheme of things should bring your website on top of a lot more SERPs that the user searches. Basically SERPs will be nothing but ads to try to get a user’s clicks.

SEM has been described as a part of SEO which will make the transition easier. After all a SERPS looking good to user is part of SEO as the better it looks the more the SEs will like it. I am moving slow by slow into this field bit more and realizing that this is where the money is in the future. As ads will always be around and websites will soon be in need to convince users to click on their SERPs to gain more positions in the user’s SERPs.

What’s you position do you the SEO industry flourishing for much longer or do you think it will decline with more personalization?

Thank You