SEO - Competing Against the Junk Pile

   Great find and worth a read folks. It is sad to ponder the future we face but I'll bet in five years the first two pages of search results will probably be pure ad targeting. 1% real content here we come.

   Search engine optimisation (SEO) was always a flawed concept.

    At its worst, it means making web content less engaging for the reader but supposedly better for search robots and for the mysterious algorithms that determine the order in which results appear for a Google search.

    At its best, it means no more than following best practice in creating clear, accessible web sites with intelligible content, meaningful titles, descriptive "alt" attributes for image, no broken links, and the rest of what makes for a high-quality web destination.

   Now SEO is dying. A striking post by Dan Graziano reveals that a Google search may display only 13% organic results; "the rest is ads and junk". In addition, a recent Forrester report on how consumers found websites in 2012 shows that social media is catching up with search, accounting for 32% of discoveries versus 54% for search, according to the US respondents, up from 25% in 2011. The trend towards localised results delivered to mobile users, perhaps via an app rather than a web page, is another reason why traditional SEO is decreasingly important.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jul/22/seo-is-dead-long-live-social-media-optimisation