Reno - 5:31 am on Nov 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

Personalization has to be looked at in conjunction with Google's expressed policy of also predicting your intentions ("we'll know what you want before you know what you want").

With that in the immediate future, the idea of "traditional SEO" will be an oxymoron, as what worked yesterday will not work tomorrow. So SEO itself will have to be re-defined in light of SERPs that display differently for different people. While I'm sure that there will be individuals who will hold the wide range of SEO skills to pull it off, more likely will be SEO teams with each team member having highly specialized expertise: page design, social media, brand building, video integration, link building, customer behavior patterns, etc.

All of which means that for many smaller sites, with less financial resources, the only path forward may be to forget SEO, forget Google, and instead build the site you want to build, the way you want to build it... and hope for the best.

..............................