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Will SEO die down soon ? Google has shocked everyone by publicly determining that they don't consider keywords.
Is all our SEO work wasted? How will the future SEO look like or better yet will there be search engines?

What will be the new trend? How will sites be ranked? Will search engines matter anymore? Social media did bring about a shift in how information was being shared. It seems to be over used and abused.

Voice your thoughts on what might be a major shift in the next few years.

Google webmaster central Blog says "Keywords simply don't have any effect in our search ranking at present"

Google is just saying the meta keywords tag is not used.
however, we have known this for a very long time, it's not new.
The reason Cutts brought this up, is because someone asked him, which is a perfect example of how "old information" still gets passed around, making our jobs more difficult when clients do not understand

Search algorithms will constantly evolve. Correct me if I'm wrong Colin but ranking on meta information was probably due to less complex bots performing the scan and more limited bandwidth than we have today. Today's ranking gives much more importance to the content that is actually present.

IMHO until such time as bots and algorithms are as complex as the human brain at interpretation on a mass scale and then tailoring to the exact needs of the searcher... then there will be optimization needed to ensure that sites rank in the manner we or customers wish.

I like the owning a vehicle approach to optimization.....

You can just keep driving your car without tuning or servicing.... but performance will get worse and it will die. It is much better to have a good mechanic servicing your vehicle on a regular basis who knows what they are doing.

Jon

My thoughts on this are like this...

a.) Keywords as meta tags may become obsolete it's bound to with scale of exploitation it has faced this long. But i dont see why we should stop using it. Minimizing it to the exact requirement would be ideal.. keywords have a potential outside the keyword meta tag. You just need to know how to efectively use it across the site via content, headings, link etc... the effect on ranking may not be that dramatic but will give you that extra edge where it matters. Adwords still is keyword centric at large... if am not mistaken. I maybe wrong.

b.) Socializing your website would be the key, how the net community at large view your website, services and how effectively you are promoting your site among netizens is whats finally going to matter. Building yourself Socially will be a key thing thats going to determine how far and how efective you reach across the masses. Even though SE's have evovlved way ahead to intrepret meaning from sentences, using keywords now and then to commumicate your point would prove to be usefull.

Earlier Google was using "Meta keyword" tag as one of the main criteria to rank websites. All SEOs started spamming that tag like below

<meta name="keywords" content="internet marketing, internet marketing, internet marketing services, internet marketing services, internet marketing, internet marketing, internet marketing services, internet marketing services" /> (Earlier more the number of keywords in this tag, high the ranking will be).

Later Google started working in their algorithm to improve search results. Meta keyword tag started losing its weightage in Google as SEOs spamming more and more. And its totally out now.

Keyword Meta tag dont have effect in Google, but we (SEOs) have other areas to work to make the site search engine friendly. But still I strongly recommend for this tag as other search engines are taking into account. Also I am using this tag to make a note of the keywords that i optimized for a particular page.

I agree with Jon words too

"I like the owning a vehicle approach to optimization.....

You can just keep driving your car without tuning or servicing.... but performance will get worse and it will die. It is much better to have a good mechanic servicing your vehicle on a regular basis who knows what they are doing."

Here's the source on Yahoo
Yahoo - http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-searc ... -tag-27303

It seems Bing also does not use the keywords.

hi all,
My thoughts:- SEO won't be a waste of time, but sticking to the old SEO techniques without observing the search engine's changing nature will surely waste our time.. Being an SEO faces the most challenging task of studying the nature of search engine trends, and as a junior am looking onto my seniors here for the guidelines...

Will there be a time when the search engines itself does the optimization task for our sites, and we sit back with ease after providing our contents to G's, Y's and others out there..

Oh, what about our job then..Like you me too don't like nightmares much..

Having a online business needs to have a marketing strategy.. I think the best marketing strategy today is the use of social media. It can drive massive traffic at any time.