Signs are pointing to some huge change coming SEO’s way. You know when Bruce Clay and Matt Cutts are talking about it, it’s worth paying attention to.

At PubCon, both of them talked with Mike McDonald of WebProNews, about the future of search, and where it is going heading into 2009. It looks like it’s going to get more personal.

Personalized, behavior-based, and intent-based search are areas that search (and Google in particular) are likely going to be focused. This means that results are going to vary depending on who is searching.

Bruce Clay gives an example about a search for “Java.” Some people will get results based on the programming languages, while some will get beverage-related results, and some will get travel-related results.

Google will deliver your results based on your searching habits, and this is going to mean headaches for SEO professionals. Bruce talks about the death of ranking. Cutts says that he wouldn’t call ranking dead, but he does seem to basically agree with the philosophies that Bruce is talking about.

SEO professionals are going to have to adjust their strategies. It’s going to be more about helping clients with the content of their sites, than obtaining links and targeting specific keywords. I’m not saying that these things will be absolutely irrelevant, but they’re not going to be as important as how engaging the site’s content is. That is what is going to attract traffic and ultimately rankings in the long run. Relevancy. That’s what it’s always been about, and Google is trying to get more relevant on a person-by-person basis with this stuff.

And don’t even get me started on Yahoo. SEOs are going to have a hell of a time getting sites ranked with Yahoo as the company continues down its path of “open” search, which basically allows third parties to tinker with results. The searchers are the ones who will benefit from the efforts of both Google and Yahoo.

SEOs may have some rocky times ahead of them. But it’s always been a continuously changing game. Why should that be any different in 2009? The answers on staying competitive aren’t concrete, and will not likely become so, but that is the challenge your competitors will face too, so in the end, it’s still anybody’s game to win.