SEO jobs to ‘suffer’ but mobile, open source jobs to fly

If you’re in the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) game, you may need to think about a career change.

A recent report from Freelancer.com suggests that SEO jobs in the future will “suffer”.

Why? Well, says Freelancer.com, Google has “intensified its fight against low quality content”. SEO is the practice of ensuring that a site occupies the highest position possible in Google, effectively the largest gateway to the quality web. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this but it does mean that if a site’s SEO is better than its content, it may occupy an abnormally high and thoroughly undeserved position in the world’s largest search engine.

Memeburn has reported extensively on how Google is being gamed on a massive scale in a variety of ways including unscrupulous SEO tricks which are bringing down the overall quality of web search results.

Google has declared war on low quality sites with good SEO and has released a variety of algorithm changes to weed out the offenders. It is anyone’s guess as to how successful Google will be at rooting out bad quality content.

Freelancer.com is a Webby-Award winning outsourcing website, which claims to be the “world’s largest outsourcing and crowdsourcing marketplace”, the company released its job stats for the first quarter of 2012, that suggests an increase in web-related job demand. According to the site’s Chief Executive, Matt Barrie, Freelancer.com’s stats are pulled from more than 3.3-million users and 1.5-million projects creating the “most comprehensive insight into online job trends”.

But as much as some jobs are in decline, some are simply booming. The world is seeing increased demand in sectors that include:

• Business process outsourcing surges. Jobs in this sector showed the highest growth in any category — up by 303% — as small businesses looked to online freelancers to help slash their expenses in the tough economy. Work in data processing, virtual assistant, and customer support jobs also saw significant growth this quarter.
• Mobile app development grows as smart phones show no sign of slowing: Android (up
  by 26% to 2,863 jobs), iPhone (up by 27% to 4,318 jobs) and iPad (up by 19% to 1,828 jobs),
  with “post-PC device” sales outstripping that of personal computers and a slew of new models
  hitting the market, the number of jobs in these areas has seen a steady increase. The demand
  for mobile developers has been insatiable and will continue to grow as more businesses seek
  to offer their products and services on these platforms.
• Open Standards will own the Web: HTML5 (up 48% to 2,160 jobs) continues its ascent as the de-facto Web 2.0 standard. The continued growth of “post-PC” devices and their support of next generation open web standards such as HTML5 has seen many businesses invest in Web 2.0 technologies such as jQuery (up 39% to 2,324 jobs). This has been to the detriment of older and proprietary technologies such as Flash (down 1% to 2,697 jobs). The continued high growth of post-PC devices, and iOS’s lack of support for Flash, has forced many companies to switch to supported open standards.

“We have seen a huge increase in outsourcing on the whole, with businesses rethinking their strategies moving into the New Year,” Barrie said.

• View the top 50 jobs here according to Freelancer.com