• ClickZ, Wednesday, January 16, 2008 2:03 PM

Mike Grehan says that SEO firms as we know them now are headed for extinction. While he extols the virtues of bringing in a team to deal with the "heavy lifting" of getting pages indexed, link-building and plugging in meta data, he notes that once taught, members of the in-house IT team (or perhaps even a dedicated SEO strategist) can handle the upkeep. And that the outside firm no longer needs to be on the payroll.

Search has become the dominant way users navigate the Web, and as such, has evolved to encompass the many ways that the Web's info is disseminated. But Grehan says that the practice of SEO has not. So while business owners know that they need to blog, craft content for YouTube, and leverage social networks for buzz--other than getting that multimedia content indexed, most pure SEO firms can't offer much help. Grehan says that unless these firms expand and begin to offer services that go beyond managing meta-data, they won't survive.

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