It's not unusual for those working in respected fields to be asked questions by those just entering (or re-entering) the job market. Naturally, the newcomers want to know about the future prospects of those fields. Search engine optimizers face those questions regularly. So what will the field look like five or ten years from now? Is it a good career choice?

The field itself has not been around very long. Starting in the mid-1990s, it fell to webmasters to optimize web sites so that they showed up high in the search engine results pages. A landmark of sorts was reached in 1996 when the first email spam touting SEO services started hitting electronic inboxes. Usenet references to SEO did not appear until 1997.

Nowadays, a search on the phrase “search engine optimization” in Google (without quotes) yields well over 43 million matches. The acronym SEO delivers 118 million matches. There are forums, blogs, articles, companies, independent contractors, and many web sites devoted to the pursuit of SEO to make money one way or another. With all that action, one would suppose that it is a promising field.

What is SEO ?

Basically, search engine optimization means making adjustments to a web site so that it scores high on the search engine results pages for particular key words and key phrases. This calls for making a variety of changes to the pages of a web site; some of these will be visible to those who view the site, and others won't. But that's only the beginning.

Since Google's algorithm counts links to a web site from other sites as “votes” for that site, one of the jobs of an SEO is to build back links. There are a number of ways to do this, from buying links to soliciting reciprocal links; the rise of blogging, web 2.0, social search/bookmarking sites offer other ways of building back links. One tried-and-true method involves building “linkbait” – content that is so useful and compelling that visitors to your site naturally want to link to it and tell others.