As we hit the new, yet to be named (is it 20 10 or 2 thousand and 10?) year many people will be wondering what there is in store for SEO and how things may change over the course of the new decade. The death knell for search engine optimisation has been sounded by many over the course of the past 10 years and yet it is still as prevalent and important today as it ever has been.

My belief is that search engine optimization will never die, it will merely evolve and this has been the case over the past number of years. Many companies and websites are still stuck to using archaic methods of SEO that have long been seen by Google as a method of coercing the ranking results and subsequently result in having no effect on a website’s ranking and in some cases result in a negative effect.

Google is due to release its new algorithm named caffeine in the coming weeks that could well have a major effect on the SERP’s in the near future in many industries and the result of this should provide the blueprint of how Google will be shifting their focus to sites that are content rich and ultimately add value to the end user for their specific search term.

One major element that Google will be focusing heavily on now and in the future is their algorithm’s ability to rank new pages with the latest news, stories and blogs. This has previously been the major down point to the way in which Google spiders the internet as it has been too slow to react to new pages being created. We have already seen an update that now includes twitter posts on the search results page that lists recent tweets relating to the search term and I can only see this type of initiative continuing in the coming year.

Modern SEO needs to continue to evolve with these changes and there will be a major shift over the course of 2010 from standard forms of linking that have been previously utilised that add little if any benefit to a more organic and natural process that involves creating a site with new and original SEO content that stands up on its own and is of use to the end user. This will promote a more organic internet where the emphasis is on imparting and sharing knowledge to create a community in which users can learn from and contribute to.

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