SEO Future?

I've been reading quite a bit of material on Google recently and I've personally come to the conclusion that sooner rather than later, search engines such as google will almost dismiss the current SEO techniques used today with a couple exceptions. I would think that Keyword rich content, Titles, links etc are and will always be very important, but the older Google gets possibly 99.999% of it's results will be based on content and interaction only? Think about the difference from 2001 to 2006 and how much less value h2 tags etc give to SEO now. (this is all of course an assumption).

Question-!

My question is, from what you all know, is it really worth the time to label images and make sure h1 h2 tags etc are labeled with Keywords ?? and if so what % would you give to the "tried and true techniques" ? At this point I think it's still important enough to spend some time on, but what do you all think??

Thank you for your input! =)

[not including alt attributes or H1 tag]

Answer it is important, will remain important and more vital in coming years regardless of SEO benefits

Most countries now have disability laws that require sites to be screen read and that includes use of alt attributes, heading tags are part of the HTML specification and are an important part of the semantic nature of HTML and XHTML they are their to provide meaning to the sentences included and that's why the search engines use them in their algorithms their importance hasn't diminished however the major engines now simply check to make sure such tags are not abused before using their content in the alogirthm.

What will change, within the next few years non validated ill-formed code will such as not including alt attributes or H1 tag will rank far worse then validating code. Sites with table based content already are starting to suffer in Google which now relies more heavily on semantic structure to determine location of content and is unable to determine what is content in a table. For many this might seem like a backward step but in reality its a kick up the arse to idiots who thought writing shit code made them a good developer.

So to answer your question I think in 2 years time you won't see non semantically driven sites in anything but google supplemental results except those with huge inbound link ratio's.

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I think there will be more changes than that. The search engine algorithms will become more AI enabled, and probably they will become more like web 2.0 sites where the user will be able to determine which sites will get the most SE traffic (something like the social media networks)

maybe though I suspect we will simply see a rise of different ways to search, I can't see Google searching being human controlled but I can see a future where Digg is used as a large search engine.

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