Great article on the current state of SEO.
Hardly. As anyone with an SEO agency will likely tell you, demand for good SEO services has merely increased. Before all the Penguin / Panda craziness, we (SEOs) had one core offering. We helped you get your on site technical shit straight, and helped with building branding and links with the end goal being to get you more exposure in the search engines. Nowadays, good SEO companies are still offering that, but there’s now a demand (and thus, services) to help Penguinized sites (both deserved and underserved) recover and Pandaized sites (both deserved and undeserved) recover. Because this shit is way too complicated at this point for anyone who doesn’t live and breathe SEO to navigate – especially where false positives are concerned. Now add in the need to understand on site factors, indexing issues, Schema markup, understanding backlink profiles, how to get keyword data when Google’s holding it hostage (except in regards to paid advertisers), the infusion of Google places, personalization, information architecture, Hummingbird and even the potential social impacts on SEO… and, well… it’s a lot to be “in the know” on.