• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, December 7, 2009

You should have been there. Just in case you weren't at the MediaPost Search Insider Summit in Park City, Utah last week, among search marketing friends talking about industry changes in 2010, I'll tell you what went down during a conversational keynote between two search gurus: Rand Fishkin, CEO and founder of SEOmoz; and Rob Griffin, senior vice president and director of search, data and analytics at Media Contact U.S.

Organic search, or search engine optimization (SEO), isn't dying. You're not getting off that easy. The industry, however, will go through some interesting changes in 2010, according to both Fishkin and Griffin.

One movement marketers will hear more about in 2010 is optimizing social graphs -- the searches from Facebook, Twitter and others. For now, SEO provides most of the visibility in search engines for these alternative channels, because they haven't yet figured out how to do this correctly.

Fishkin suspects that social graph metrics will become more important in 2011, even more so than next year. I think it could even change the percentage of funds marketers allocate to SEO and paid search.

Last year in the U.S., companies spent about 10% of their search marketing budgets on SEO, compared with about 90% for paid search. (During the Q&A section that followed, Janel Landis Laravie, founder of Booyah Search, noted that paid search agencies typically only get 5% and 10% of the total client budget, with the remainder going to engines like Google.)

Also up for discussion was Twitter's ability to cannibalize links, said to contribute to the shift in dollars. A couple of years ago marketers would write a blog post, and within two week might have 50 sites linking to it. Not anymore, Fishkin said. Marketers might get about 500 people reading the post and 20 times more references, but 90% comes through Twitter in the form of retweets; you're lucky if the blog post earns 10 links.

When the blogosphere and search engines start to feel this shift, they will take action, Fishkin said. One of two things will happen: either the number of links will shrink for all, which will make it acceptable, or the engines will start taking signals from Facebook and Twitter into consideration. "Two or three years from now, you won't feel so bad seeing the retweets," Fishkin said.

In fact, marketers have already begun to see some of that integration through agreements between Google and Twitter, and Google and Microsoft Bing, Griffin added.

From the audience, Aaron Goldman, managing partner at Connectual, agreed that these days blog posts get more link juice from Twitter. When Goldman asked if there's evidence that search engines are taking into account links in Twitter for ranking algorithms, Fishkin said that SEOmoz data as of the end of September suggests the answer is "no." "My personal opinion is yes," he added -- "because I think they use it in the query reserves practice algorithm that Google runs on queries that have high amounts of search and spike search volume, [thus] accelerating news articles, or instances of rare keyword match phrases."

Fishkin explained further that SEOmoz has a ranking model that tries to estimate Google's ranks. It's only 65% accurate. This ranking model uses machine learning to help you see within some margin of error the difference a specific contribution makes. This is how Fishkin came up with his Twitter answer.

As for paid search, Fishkin said it's becoming a commodity for agencies and consultants. It won't remain a profit center long-term. Margins are shrinking. It's becoming more difficult to find the differentiators. Many companies are developing software and the algorithms around them get better. The return on investment as a percentage of paid search continues to shrink -- in part because of people becoming better at attribution, which makes the margin thinner, he said.