• Search Engine Journal , Wednesday, June 11, 2008 1 PM

Richard Burckhardt takes Asif Anwar to task for a recent prediction (in an article dubbed "13 Prophecies of Internet Marketing") that on-page/on-site SEO is headed for extinction.

"It will just take some time to identify ways to evaluate each site irrespective of Web development language used," Anwar wrote. "But, they will eventually get rid of the need to optimize your site for the Search Engines."

While Anwar may be right about the engines developing ways to evaluate pages regardless of whether a site is built in HTML, all Flash or some other, new development code--Burckhardt says that what's actually on the page will still matter.

"What are the search engines going to use to determine content, relevancy, theme, etc. if they are paying no attention to what is on the page?" Burckhardt says. "Even if they do come up with OCR, image, Visual Algorithm Update or whatever as he mentions, there's still got to be content, regardless of development language, for the engines to read, thus, optimizing it in some way will always, always, always be needed."

Read the whole story at Search Engine Journal »