Are SEO Businesses on the Road to Extinction?

Will they be replaced by SEM saavy Agencies?

[cyril kearney]

This morning the big news is that Yahoo is to acquire Overture. Speculation is that LookSmart, AskJeeves and FindWhat may be acquired by Microsoft. Surprisingly the guys that will be hurt the most are dancing in the streets.

Search Engines are now generally accepted as paid advertising vehicles. Unpaid listing even when optimized are not yielding enough buyers to support most sites. So, why pay anyone to optimize? Why pay money on SEO?

The days of the successful small sites, the mom and pop-ers are fading under three advertising giants. This latest bad news follows the overall revenue trend for small sites. Banner ad revenue is almost gone. Newletter and Email marketing is being legislated and filtered out of existance.

Content may still be king but remember there is just so much space on any supermarkets shelves. Just as the growth of the three TV networks wiped out the small and local advertising marketplace in TV, I predict the same chilling effect on small sites on the Internet.

[penfold25]

I agree. Yahoo could decide to do anything, from my point of view their is no benefit to SEO's, Yahoo now do control much internet presense and the small sites that used to have a chance to sWebmasterWorldith the big fish might not have the chance anymore.
I believe things may not get any better for SEOs, the good times may be over.