The future of organic SEO looks bright despite much hullabaloo about the changing behavior of search engines to go for PPC. By the time they go for full fledge paid inclusion program, they may loose their popularity. You may find verification of this argument in Overture. There has been a significant shift of searchers from overture to Google, msn, Yahoo, or other search engines.

In 2001, the controversy swirls around a revenue-producing aspect of search engines. Consumer Alert, a consumer watchdog, filed a complaint with the FTC suggesting search engines were changing the nature of their results pages. According to the complaint, instead of presenting results based solely on objective algorithms, the search engines were including results found by paid inclusion and paid placement. Consumer Alert requested that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigate whether these companies are violating federal prohibitions against deceptive acts or practices by inserting advertisements in search engine results without clear and conspicuous disclosure that the ads are ads. This concealment may mislead search engine users to believe that search results are based on relevancy alone, not marketing ploys.

Despite the explosion of paid placement sales as a source of revenue for search engines, users remain largely unaware of these issues. 62% users are not able to distinguish paid and unpaid results while 32% Internet surfers do understand them. But soon the figure is going to change. Further, if search engines do not produce relevant results the users trust, they loose their trust and hence their popularity dips down. Or who knows other engines may take advantage of their competitor's downfall!

In the earlier Consumer WebWatch findings, if an engine revealed it was taking fees for placement, 56% said it wouldn't affect their user of the engine, although almost 1/3 said they would be "less likely to use" such a search engine and this ratio will further increase to a great extent if major search engines go for PPC in toto.

Once we are sure that organic SEO is going to stay for long, how do we then predict the future of SEO in a country like India?

The future prospect of SEO in India depends on the success of e-commerce. So, what does the future hold for e-commerce? According to a report from Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), Internet adoption is growing in India at a record pace due to falling cost of broadband, a rising demand for e-commerce and increasing in domain registrations. According to IAMAI the number of Internet users in India reached 38.5 million at the end of 2005 (up 54% in the last year) and could reach 100 million by 2007.

IAMAI findings show the most popular online activities undertaken by Internet users in India in 2005 (as a % of respondents):

E-mail and IM: 98%
Job search: 51%
Banking: 32%
Bill payment: 18%
Stock trading: 15%
oMatrimonial search: 15%

The Indian Internet population is currently over 25 million and is expected to grow to 100 million by 2007, according to the Internet & Online Association of India (IOAI).

The IOAI's figure for Internet users in India falls in the middle of other estimates.
oeTForecasts (September 2004): 37.0 million
oPricewaterhouseCoopers (July 2004): 30.0 million
oeMarketer (April 2005): 21.3 million
oEconomist Intelligence Unit (February 2005): 15.7 million

Over 50% of Web users in Indian metropolitan areas are between the ages of 19 and 30, with an additional 22% between 31 and 40. Users under the age of 18 are rare.

The Internet has been a key driver of the Indian economy, helping to make Bangalore a leading technology center. Outsourcing is bringing billions of dollars of foreign investment into the country every year. Now, consumer purchasing online in India is beginning to pick up as well.

Annual online consumer purchasing reached approximately US$130 million in 2004-2005, according to the Internet & Online Association of India (IOAI). The total is expected to grow sharply over the next two years, reaching US$ 550 million by 2006-2007. Click here to know in detail.

The most popular purchases online in India are clothes (46 percent of shoppers), music / CDs (29 percent of shoppers) and books (26 per cent of shoppers). Some 69 percent of users in India spent up to 500 Rupees online during the previous four weeks. Further, Online travel company MakeMyTrip, which had launched its website for the Indian market in September 2005, expects its Indian revenues to surpass contribution from its US operations by 2007-08. The development comes at a stage when the Internet in India is increasingly becoming a great resource for travel planning.

Though India lags behind the global average of 34 percent of penetration in Internet usage, yet the above statistics gives us a hope to assume India as the biggest e-commerce economy to explore in near future. At time when India is getting matured enough for e-business, the Government of India must be prepared to address security issue. Otherwise, history of 1990s may repeat!