Cris,

You absolutely right that these two questions are intimately related, but let me answer in two parts and link them together:

1) Future of SEO
Mike Grehan spoke at the SES San Jose conference last year and really cracked me up. He said back in the late 90s he was conducting SEO for a client and informed them that their site was in the top 10 results for a search engine (I believe it was Alta Vista). "Where in the top 10?" the client asked to which Mike replied, "No, no, the ENTIRE top 10 results."
A humorous story, but it also illustrates to us that SEO has come a long way! I believe SEO in the future will bear only a slight resemblance of its present self. The presence of ever-exploding video content, current "new frontier" of social networks, and increasing sophistication of search engine algorithms will create a whole new landscape. From my perspective, SEO will follow the trend of the Internet as a whole in creating more user value through customized results.

Many SEOs are frightened by the intrusion of Google's so-called Universal Search (which includes video and other content into traditional search results), calling this the "death of SEO". I for one believe it will create challenges, but SEOs will eventually adapt by focusing less on mass produced SEO campaigns and ad campaign messages and more on targeting users with content creation and narrowly focused ads.

2) Google, the King of Monetization
Despite recent DOJ antitrust action against the Google ad empire, I doubt Google is going anywhere. The fact of the matter is, Google is pretty adept at anticipating user desires and implementing changes to their product that fulfill that desire. As I mentioned above, the Google's main premise of change is to customize search results for users. This currently includes serving different Adwords ads based on user activity, and I suspect it will be just a short time before we start to see customized organic search results with even more integrated video, news and local content.

Does that mean everyone in SEO will be suddenly unemployed? No, not everyone. The SEOs that have built careers around chasing the latest algorithm change will be. But those SEOs who have the heart of a marketer, who have extensively profiled their audience and are already familiar with delivering highly targeted messages and creating user-centric content will adjust just fine.

As far as how Google plans to monetize this new SEO future, that or course remains to be seen. The pay-per-click pricing model has proven to be a huge success, and recent tweaks in quality score guidelines are making them even more money. However, I think even Google things they should diversify a little, since they are already beta testing of conversion and action based fees structures. For right now, I see Google maintaining a cafeteria menu of fee options for advertisers, since that will win over more customer and in the end prove the most lucrative.

Hope that helps!

posted September 12, 2008

In my opinion, it will continue the way it's going: Content is king with quality links. Search engines will probably become very skilled at determining content from text, making descriptions and titles (now important) have less value. Meta keywords will be eliminated altogether. Google already does not value them. Search engines should become even more adept at determining the sites value from the way humans perceive sites, including the visual appeal. As it stands, some of the top sites are visually unappealing but have good content. SEO in the future should not be based on research of keywords with meticulous and careful placement of these words in the right places (keywords in title, h1 tag, description tag, meta tag). I believe that search engines will be able to determine the value from content, and if the content is important and relevant. If the site is done well, it will get to the top naturally, without all the careful keyword placement and excessive link-building strategies of today.

I believe that Google's pay-per-click will be refined even more to root out irrelevant and dishonest sites. Ads from searches are one of the few good ads out there, because people are looking for that. Adsense, along with banner ads, will probably be valued less, because of ads not often being relevant to content. They will continue to be used, however, because of peoples desire to make passive money, however small.

posted September 24, 2008

First, defining SEO:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

Google is not the only SEO company:
To name a few:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines

Providing SEO service:
Yahoo! - global
Microsoft Live - global
Ask.com - global
Baidu - China
Yandex - Russia
Rambler - Russia
Timway - Hong Kong

There is a certain competition among SEO's and, especially in certain linguistic regions.
Google is undoubtedly a key player.

Google can easily make money with PPC: Pay per click.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_per_click
may give a further insight in this mechanism.

posted September 29, 2008