This post is addressed to all the small business SEO agencies that dreams and aspires to become leaders in their respective markets, and to all those ones that have the experience and can contribute to the ‘brainstorming’ my thoughts desire to open.

The future is now
(The Hudsucker Proxy, Joel & Ethan Coen, 1994)

I always loved History and I am one of those who wanted to be an archeologist after seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Therefore, before trying to give my answer to the question I am proposing to all of you, I would like to remember how SEO evolved since the middle ’90s.

To help me (and to avoid a boring academic history lesson), I show you this great timeline realized and explained by Greenlight in this post, ), that has also links to many interesting sources (one being a Rand post).

Ok, did you take your time to look at the timeline? Good.

What got me thinking weren’t the facts themselves, but the bars in the middle showing the relative importance of factors in SEO over time.
We see that the first bar shows just one factor (On Page SEO) and the last one six (On Page SEO, PageRank,  Anchor Text, Domain Authority, Link Contest and Users Signals).

This isn't the place to discuss the relative proportion to give to each one of these factors. What is to state definitely is that now SEO no longer relies just on On Page Optimization and Link Building. SEO – as a discipline - now is something more. Something that includes techniques, knowledge and is influenced from other disciplines that weren’t so necessary once to know or understand completely: Marketing, Information Technology, Economics, Journalism, Audiovisual, Sociology, Semiotics…

Perhaps SEO is and will be the most Renaissance branch of knowledge connected to the promotion and the success of an enterprise through the Web. In this sense, SEO is or is going to be really an Art.

And here comes my answer to my own question: What will the role model for the SEO of tomorrow be?

Leonardo Da Vinci, as Michelangelo or many of the Renaissance artists, was not just a painter or engineer or a scientist or an architect or an inventor or a writer: he was all of them.

If I have to choose a role model, he would be surely the one. And he could be a role model for any SEO individual and agency:

1. he was an engineer (aka developer), and as an engineer he worked in Milan hired by the Duke of Milan Ludovico il Moro (somehow a VC of his times);
2. he was a scientist (aka analytics), as his studies of anatomy, geology and paleontology demonstrate;
3. he was a painter (aka creativity), and we all know him because of his masterpieces;
4. he was an inventor (aka entrepreneur), and he’s considered the moral father of flying, of submarines, of the use of the solar energy and created the first mechanical calculator;
5. he was a writer (aka communicator).

And my list could continue.

You are maybe thinking that to have Leonardo as a role model is pretentious. Maybe you are right. But my focus is not  to be Leonardo, but to be Leonardesque in my approach to life and to SEO & Web Marketing.

And I did mine these thought of Leonardo:

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

and

Learning never exhausts the mind.

But one thing I like to remember as well: also the simplest thing if pursued with perseverance can mean your success.

Or just think about Norville Barnes and his Hula Hoop.