Google's Matt Cutts spoke in a video interview with WebProNews to give his views on how SEO is changing.

Cutts said, "I'm not sure I would say ranking is dead, but it's not as important as it used to be."

"The fact is the smart SEOs are not just necessarily looking at the rankings. They are looking at conversion, they are looking at their server log. It's great if you're ranking for a phrase, but unless that leads to sales that doesn't help you very much."

Personalization and localization of search results is becoming more prevalent. "If you do a search for the word bank in the United States, you'll get Bank of America and America bank. If you search in England, you'll get Thomas Cook and different banks entirely."

Cutts continued: "So the whole notion that you can do a search and you can send it to a friend and they're always going to get the exact same result, that's just not true any more."

Watch that video to find out what else Matt Cutts had to say about things like:

• - Universal search
• - Videos and images on web sites (there is a down side)
• - Acceptable (trackable) video formats
• - Video rendering limitations of mobile devices (such as iPhone and Google Android)
• - Avoiding the overuse of subdomains (using subdirectories might be better in some cases)
• - How black hat SEOs doing their illegal thing are making life harder for ethical SEOs.