I think the idea of breaking SEO down to the white hat and black hat camps really misses where the real divisions are. I believe that the biggest differences between SEOs are in their levels of experience, their honesty, their creativity, and how aggressive we are.

After search engines stop ranking brands that you worked hard to build it is easy to lose a bit of respect for them, especially if they promote what they would otherwise call spam if it wasn't in their network, and they rank a few of your sites that are so bad that you are a bit embarrassed to admit you own them. With that, I present the the SEO Learning Life-cycle, and things we might say as we progress along it :)

The Newbie SEO

Here is a person new to the market.

• follow search engine guidelines

• you don't want to get banned for spamming
• spammers get banned forever, and will never rank!!!
• I have been creating 10 high quality articles a day
• the best site ranks at the top
• everything is overpriced, you can learn everything you need from forums
• the search engine representative said ____ so it must be true
• I make $3 to $30 a day off AdSense!

A Search Optimizer With a Few Rankings

The excitement of a few top rankings is just setting in! Google has yet to burn down any of your websites.

• list your site in directories and submit articles and trade links

• make sure you submit to my high PageRank directory!!!! submissions are now 50% off
• you can learn most everything you need from forums
• AdSense is a great business model...I love AdSense
• keep creating content and building links it is only a matter of time until it ranks
• BTW...here is another high PageRank directory you can submit to

A Person With Many Top Search Engine Rankings

At this level you can afford to go to many conferences. After attending a few of them, you no longer care about rankings, you want results. You start patterning your actions after those who are making money, not those who are giving the same speech they gave 6 years ago, and not those who are popular but can't figure how to make money from their popularity.

• wow most of these rankings amount to nothing

• search is not as good as people claim it to be
• I better start tracking results a bit better
• wow these few pages make a lot...maybe i should make a few more pages targeting these terms, and rewrite these other pages to make them more conversion oriented

The Arrogant (Semi)Professional SEO

Here you start getting full of yourself a bit prematurely, but are profitable enough to get away with it, and ignorant enough that you don't know any better. Google has not burned down any of your sites yet, and if they did you figure those sites deserved what they got because they are low quality.

The sites you care about are of high quality though, and they will grow almost every month until one of them gets toasted.

• I am a professional SEO. I know this stuff. These are the rules

• We are better than everyone. We have the best content
• We don't buy links because we are white hat SEOs
• People link to us because we have the best content, as do our clients
• We don't make much from our rankings, but that is because we chose not to, because we are ethical

The Seasoned Pragmatic SEO

At this stage you are making more in a month than most people make in a year, spend most of your time working on your own sites, rarely do client work, are rather selective with the client work you are willing to take on. If you do much client work you created a business model that sells a product or a bulk low value services.

Google has helped you build at least one 6 figure a year income stream, and has also probably burned down at least one of them. Even if you think it was unfair, unjust, or unreasonable they taught you the value of paranoia, anonymity, and make you become much more aggressive and much more quiet about the projects you are working on.

You likely have partners, and the questions you ask at this level are no longer black and white, but are colored in shades of gray, and often framed from the perspective of how others will react to what you are doing.

Quality content once again becomes a myth, after you see some of your best information go nowhere, and some of your worst referenced all over the web. The realization that creating garbage that strokes someone's ego is more important than the quality of your content smacks you in the face. You become results oriented. Your marketing is better targeted than ad agencies or public relations firms could dream of creating. Some of your marketing is so effective that your sites get penalized because you got too many links too quick.

• It doesn't look like spam if everyone is talking about me.

• If something didn't work before, it probably isn't going to work again, but here is a quick test site I don't mind losing. If it does work how do I scale this idea commercially?
• What can I bolt onto this thin affiliate site to get it links? Here is our first feature article: 43 ways to get and use a credit card without actually having it registered to your real name
• How do I add enough value (without harming the conversion rate) to get this to pass a hand check?
• Some of those links from _____ pack more of a punch than you would think, but if everyone has too much information to act on any of it I am best off if I don't say anything. :)
• Does this bought link look like a bought link?
• Wow I can't believe how many links yahoo are buying, is my brand strong enough to get away with that?
• If my brand is not strong enough to buy links, then I will buy a few high ranking websites, just like all the big players are doing.
• Wow I can't believe my friend just cloned my site. And so did Google! Attacked from every angle!
• Why is that spammy site ranking? How can I leverage that exploit on someone else's authoritative domain, or if I use it on my own site, how can I do it without looking as spammiy as that did?

I have recently read up on the US News & World Report college rankings, and to what great lengths some colleges go to manipulate the results and improve their rankings. Rankings are very powerful because they are a signal of social acceptance and appear unbiased. Every important ranking system that displays results to those being ranked ends up influencing those it measures.

From a marketer's perspective the idea of the authority system influencing the network has 4 big marketing ideas contained inside it:

• The Ranker is God: If you are one of the first to create a ranking system and spread it quickly then it will be hard for others to compete with you. Some of those who rank well will lend their brand credibility and reach to help push and validate your rankings.

• God is Not Fair: If a ranking system is unjust and you are one of the most vocal opponents of it then you can quickly gain a lot of authority and exposure.
• Everyone Spams God: Even if people say they do not support spamming, that is probably public relations spin to help push their brand. See the prior two points for how that works.
• God Changes Her Mind: If you watch how the various parties play off of each other that should lend key insights into how the authority systems will change going forward, which keep you ahead of the competition. For example, how will Google's acquisition of Feedburner change how they measure blogs, or how does the Chicago Tribune's freelance blog network effect Google's heavy reliance on domain authority score (and trust of links from authoritative sites)?

What is considered good marketing offline is often referred to as spam online. If anyone finds the classification as being a spammer offensive or inaccurate, don't forget that Google recently recommended health care companies spam the public, by plastering ads all over the web:

Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message.

It is only considered spam if Google isn't getting a cut of the profit.

All you have to do is look at all the spammy .edu pages that rank for stuff like ringtones and prescription drugs to know that if you have an authoritative site it does not take much to rank for competitive terms. It only took Matt Cutts one external citation with the associated anchor text to rank for buy cheap Viagra.

If you have a number of low quality sites on broad array of topics, or many online friends who are willing to help you with a link here or there, it is easy to make an authoritative site rank well enough to make deep into 5 or 6 figures a month from it.

This is why many of the best SEOs forgo early profits to build domain authority, and create high value editorial channels with few ads on the same sites as commercial offers to subsidize the rankings of the lower value offer pages.

John Pozadzides wanted to test this theory, so here is a link to help test it Buy Cheap Viagra And SEO.

As I have watched brands grow and die I have come to the conclusion that the concept of value is an important ingredient in a successful site, but as an editorial content provider, value alone is not enough to grow much past sustainability.

People want to have something they can talk about and share, something they can relate to, and something that inspires them and brings them hope. Emotional appeal is typically far more important than logical appeal. In some cases the hope is for change of things they do not like, but that has three potential outcomes

• the fight is one that will not be won (and the ideas you are fighting against may be gaining ground in other markets)

• change is brought about and the people creating change eventually forget where they came from, walk on other people without care, and become the people they once despised (relevancy comes and goes like the seasons)
• change is brought about and the cause no longer exists

After a battle is over you still have to have something worth talking about and create something inspiring if you are to keep attention and mindshare.

How much money is spent marketing fear to people? Do you need health insurance? Would you still need it if you ate healthy? People gravitate toward their interests for an escape from fear-mongering and other injustices that are baked into society.

Fear is easy to forget, and is a message that needs to be marketed over and over again to cause response. In most cases, spreading fear also has limited upside social potential...it is more commonly used to exploit people, so we learn to tune it out. We take off our shoes before going through the metal detectors, but how many people still sleep on the airplane? I know I do. And people live on the sides of mountains, in fire zones, and where earthquakes are common. I know I do.

Why do award programs work so well? They are easy to relate too and make people feel good. Nearly daily I get emails about how a person quit their job or sold their business because I inspired them and helped them want to go out on their own.

When I think of the most explosive growth periods in brands I have helped build they are typically associated with periods of time when the owner was passionate about what they were doing. That passion attracts people who share it and want to spread it. When I think of the periods that they lost marketshare they are more in-line with the times they lack creativity and passion.

In a saturated market packaging and formatting are often more important than the message. Sustainable value systems change with the times.

As an entrepreneur most of us have many failures before we have any successes. I recently made the Technorati top 100 blogs, but have already dropped to 102, and that position will likely fade unless I can be a bit more inspiring than I have been recently.

Andrew Goodman wrote a delightfully good column over at SEL about how and when going niche is wrong. He noted that the advice to go niche typically comes from niche market thought leaders and people selling information products who tend to think everyone else is just like them.

The reason people push the niche idea are:

• it is easy advice to give

• overestimating the value of our own experience
• the web has many self-reinforcing effects that favor market leaders
• it is hard to conquire a big field until you have proven success and gained confidence from conquering a smaller niche
• it doesn't take much to get past self sustaining if you focus on something you are passionate about
• it is harder to get burned out working on something you are passionate about

It is a mistake I have made many times, but it is easy to speak of your own experiences as truth, especially if you are expected to write nearly every day. Focusing too tightly on a niche for an extended period of time makes it easy to become inauthentic, inaccurate, boring, and/or pessimistic. Those are obvious to anyone who reads frequently, and they are counter to what allows companies to expand:

We can certainly see how small to midsized retailers—online and off—who undergo recognizable and surprising spurts of growth, seem to have something in common beyond the executional wisdom and recruiting skills of the larger enterprises that Collins tracks in Good to Great. That intangible seems to be: contagious excitement.

The market for something to believe in is infinite.

If you are making 50 websites it is likely that you will be more successful if you focus on one or two of them before building out all the others, such that you incorporate learning from your first few sites into your later sites. Why repeat all the mistakes? In the same sense, it helps to conquer one market position before going too broad. When I started on the web I wanted to know a lot more about search than I could have profitably done, especially since the market already had clear market leaders with momentum, social relationships, media relationships, strong brand, capital, and knowledge advantages over me.

After I niched down to SEO and built a brand I was able to create numerous revenue streams (consulting sales, ebook sales, direct ad sales, contextual ad sales, affiliate commissions, link sales, referral commissions, speaking engagements, etc). It is also easy to further leverage my knowledge gained building this site to provide more revenue streams away from this site. I have a network idea I want to launch soon, but it still needs some work.

I have long been a fan of parallel markets after attaining self reinforcing authority status in a core market.