The Death of SEO?

A very interesting article by Mike Grehan over at ClickZ:
SEO Is Dead. Long Live, er, the Other SEO

Mike waxes for a while in this one about the "death" of SEO, or, more specifically, the death of SEO as we know it. Perhaps this "death" will also be a way for SEO to catch up with the technology of the current day. Mike points to Ask.com several times in this article, saying that their 3-column approach has basically turned the SERP into a virtual portal on the information searched for. He's right, and he may also be right about this being the future of SERPs.

If it is, then we may see Google follow suit and ditch the adwords column on its SERP in favor of a 3rd column displaying more universal search (US) results. However, since Google rarely seems to follow trends that it didn't start in this industry, I wouldn't hold my breath. It's just possible, that's all I'm saying.

One question to ask is, if Google and other SEs did go to the 3-column SERP, what would be the future of adwords-type advertising? Where will it go on the page? If you view this Ask.com SERP, you can see only one sponsored link, for Target.com, who obviously paid a lot of money to get their link right in the center of the page. If you actually go to page 2 and following, it's at the top of each page.

I've actually thought that Google's layout for US SERPs was lacking something, and now that I've taken a decent look at the Ask.com SERPs, I think the 3-column approach is where they should go if they want to improve it. I look at this SERP from Google, and I have to say that Ask has the upper hand. I see a lot of white space - that could be used just to drive revenue (adwords), if not for US results. The US results are there, but it's at the expense of traditional results, which I don't think is the answer.