Will SEO As We Know It Exist In 2035?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Search engine optimization has been pretty steady for the past 10 years. But that’s no guarantee that things will remain the same. And the way that things change online, you could see major developments appear almost overnight that usher in sweeping changes in the way that webmasters approach SEO for their websites. Or, things just may go on the way they are now indefinitely. Who knows?

There has been lots of talk about semantic language indexing and natural language optimization, but for the past 10 years or so the primary component in on-page optimization has been keyword usage. To be sure, SEO has centered around two things: Keywords and links (trust). How long before that changes?

That’s a question that no one can answer. But I think we’ll always have some element of link analysis and keyword-based optimization. Even with semantic language optimization. Why do I think this? Because semantic language indexing still relies on understanding what the context of a page of content is all about. That requires analyzing the text for words. There has to be a dominant concept within the body on a text and that concept is delineated by the text’s language. That is, keywords.

Keywords may someday diminish in importance for judging content quality, but I don’t think it will ever disappear completely. What do you think?