DM News: Keynote: Don't Forget SEO

Search engine guru Danny Sullivan told the Search Engine Strategies conference that, even as paid listings have become dominant in the industry, unpaid search engine optimization is increasingly complex and important. MSN will introduce its own web crawler within the year, potentially making it even harder to optimize pages for one search engine without hurting listings on another. "Search engine optimization is not going away," Sullivan said. "It's only going to get more complicated."

Sullivan recommended that search engines become a bit more open about which optimization practices will be allowed and which will garner sanctions. Most search engine companies have been coy with their methods for fear of allowing their algorithms to be unfairly gamed by unscrupulous optimizers touting content irrelevant to specific searches.