LooseSuits

No, because some sites will still have more traffic and be more important than others, which is the basis for PageRank.

I think that in some respects the SEO industry will change to more of a Internet Marketing and Optimizing. If you look at the serious changes to the way things are done in SEO over the last 2 years alone i think we will continue to see more ways to market and optimize and get natural results from new methods. Social is everywhere nowdays and local also opens up alot to SEO/ Internet Marketing strategies. Just stay creative and im sure youll never truly run out of ways to SEO or market/drive traffic to your site online.

There will always be a first page of search results and you will always need to be as close to the top as you can for your niche. Yes, content will be more and more important, but especially as the importance of social networks in increasing, there is yet work for the SEO consultant.

Once all sites are optimised perfectly we will be back to the good content, and back links thing and those have just as much to do with SEO as keyword density, meta tags, semantics, and all the other SEO optimisations.

Again it boils down to getting people to utilize web standards. Where I live peope still use Frontpage and Windows 98. Good luck convincing them about standards.

You overestimate the ability of the masses to have the attention span to understand SEO. Social bookmarking is much easier to grasp, so people will flock there. It is the perfect smokescreen for Search Engine Optimization.

I've never heard about the "ending" of SEO, I can't imagine myself looking for infos without Google... (integrated in my browser: Safari).

As was mentioned before, there is always a first SERP. SEO in the future may be wildly different than we know it today, but it will forever be present.

Recently I blogged about the declining interest in *searching* for the terms search engine optimisation/optimization as shown by Google Trends. Yes, allowing for inherent flaws in that tool, there is indeed a small, steady decline over the past 2-3 years.

Since most SEOs search for their own sites using that phrase, that particular metric is skewed, but it is an interesting concept to ponder.

To respond to the OP, even if every website were perfectly optimised, it will always boil down to *relevance*. The searcher is looking for something and a given search engine will have an algo to display the most relevant pages. Since all sites are perfectly optimised, yet only a few sites can fit on page 1, there will always be a quest to become more relevant. Perhaps we will call it Relevancy Optimisation!

As a trained and dedicated SEO practitioner, I can personally say that I don't see the end of SEO coming anytime soon. We will always have a market for SEO experts to work because my experience with "big-wigs" has shown that most of them don't even know what we do exactly and it will be impossible for smaller sites to have our techniques implemented. The newly created sites will most likely have optimized sites, but as some of you guys mentioned earlier, CONTENT IS KING nowadays.

I get called in to firm after firm that just doesn't get SEO at all. That includes big corporations, ad agencies and web developers.

People are still mystified by it - utterly mystified. I really don't see it going away any time soon.

End of SEO - End of Internet - End for the world))))

many people work in internet and really enjoi it , i can't imagine my life without it , it is like fish without water , sun without rays.

LOL... What a load of ** hehehe..

Is marketing ever going to stop.. I think not.. Marketing changes with the times..

The second a search engine/ app stop using a algo then it will be the end

Define algorithm:
A set of rules that a search engine uses to rank the listings contained within its index, in response to a particular query.

The only way to remove a algo is to remove the index.. No index, no information .. And no internet..

The only way SEO will stop is if everyone stopped updating sites with new content. Since this will never happen - you can always join the fight.

The way I look at this is similar to the fact that some people say "it is too late to start a blog". I thought the same thing in 2005 but did it anyways.

I remember seeing a video or webpage, either from Stompernet or Wikipedia, that says Google's algorithm takes into account more than a million variables for a site.

From Google:

Googlefriendly = Design & Usability + Web Site Navigation + Page Content + Keyword Research

I'm sure there are a lot of other variables like traffic and how often the site is updated with good content, actually, who knows what's in Google's algorithm...

Google uses over 200 "signals" to sort search results, not millions.

SEO is a bit of a misnomer for what many online marketers do since there are more channels that just standard search engines for driving traffic to a web site.

The introduction of unified or combined search, blending multiple media types into the main search results - a sort of "meta media" search, does provide opportunities for the creation, optimization and promotion of content previously ingnored.

People will still call it SEO though, whether it means viral content promotion, link bait, social media or keyword optimization of videos, images and text.

Greetings all,
This is the problem with many people they lack the understanding of SEO or treat SEO as a single component. Not that many years ago we would use a marketing company to handle our brand campaign.
With the introduction of technology, a part of the market that is the realm of the professional marketer was pushed over to the tech geek in many cases.

We have to look at a SEO campaign as far more than that, in fact it is a component to a successful branding campaign or marketing campaign. Looking at the bigger picture and understanding how branding pays particular importance as a market grows and saturates, will answer the question that there is no end to SEO in sight.

As a commenter earlier made marketing is a forever changing entity as we as people are always moving ot changing the goal posts as it were. We see the importance of balanced marketing campaigns hence why we have traditional marketers and technology based marketers within our resource scope.

We as one are pushing for SEO, SEM and all things internet and technology driven options back to where they should in the marketing company's portfolio, after all does it not make sense for marketing people to be in charge of brand awareness.

Have a B L O G G I N G good day!
Patrick Ryall

I think good SEO is a way of following the best practices, which I think will evolve. And SEO is only our effort, the traffic that it will drive will depend on more aspects, like backlinks and valid code.

It's funny because people that don't really understand SEO think that SEO = high Google ranking alone and it's a complete misconception. They expect SEO to make up for poor marketing and it can't work miracles - it has to be an ingredient in an effective overall Marketing strategy to work.

There's a point where you can build your urls/metadata/semantic markup the proper ways but your rankings won't go "up". The reaction that you get is that there's a problem with SEO and that's not the case. It's just a piece of the puzzle.

Well said, SEO in my mind is about standard compliant code and good well written and relevant content and that's it.