The latest Google update has come and gone. That must mean that it is time to start debating the future of SEO — or rather, what new thing is going to mean the death of SEO this year. Anyone who has been in the industry for more than a year can recall the cyclical arguments of how SEO is dying and in the process of being replaced by something else. What that something else is changes from directories to portals to mobile to social media to some other factor.

For those out of the loop, SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is the process of optimizing a webpage to appear in a high position in search engine results. The higher the position, the more people are likely to click through to the page and engage with the content there, usually by making a purchase or filling out a lead form.

Most experts will agree that SEO is alive and well, it is just changing. Any SEO with a sense of history understands that change is the industry constant. The search engine of 2010 doesn’t look like the one from 2005 which looks even less like the search engines of 2000 (pre-Google).  So the future of SEO is change and in the immediate future that means incorporating social signals and addressing the diversification of search engines.

Social Media Signals

It is true that the explosion of social media has changed the landscape of SEO over the past few years.  Instead of looking to millions of web pages to determine what people on the web want to see, Google & Bing now have to take into account all the tweets, pins, shares, likes, etc. that indicate what people are “voting for” in terms of web content so that they can serve up that content in their results.

Any SEO that isn’t taking social signals into account when designing their strategies is missing out and may, mistakenly, begin to believe that SEO doesn’t “work” anymore.  Those on top of their game have already realized this fact and have integrated social signals into their strategies, helping their clients or their own sites, stay at the top of the results.

Diversification of Search Engines

Today Google dominates SEO, and has for quite some time. However, there was SEO before Google and there will be SEO after Google loses its dominance, or at least loses some of its market share. And the latter is already happening.

Tied into the rise of social media is a change in how people search.  While many still have Google, or Bing, as their go to search engine, more and more people are learning to search in other places.  Someone who wants to find out about the work of a particular actor or writer may go to imdb.com, amazon.com or Wikipedia and search there rather than going to a search engine.  Facebook has introduced their Graph Search, and many people searching for specific photos or videos turn to Flickr or YouTube directly.

The proliferation of search from traditional web engines like Google does not mean the end of SEO. It means a good SEO professional is going to have to know how to optimize a site for all the relevant search engines, whether they are web search, image search, video search, social search, or some other type of search.

Looking for the short answer to the future of SEO? It’s not social signals or diversification or any other catch phrase. It’s evolution based on change in user behavior. Any SEO who can stay ahead of that curve will never have cause to believe that SEO is dead.