Many people are syndicating the story that search personalization will kill SEO. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each time search engines add variables to their ranking algorithms they create opportunity. Plus as the field gets muddier those who understand how communities interact with search will have more relative influence over the marketplace. Quality SEO is not based on using a rank checker for arbitrary terms and cranking out meaningless ranking reports. It is based on measuring traffic streams and conversions. If the search engines are sending you more leads or better converting leads then your SEO is working.

Customers worth having don't care about ranking reports. They care about conversions. Other than to create a straw man scenario for self promotional stories, why have rank checkers suddenly become important?

The difference between getting 5 links and 50 links for a story is often just a couple good mentions. With 5 links the story may be marginally profitable, and the same story could be wildly profitable with 50 links. Every day key bloggers are hunting for stories worth talking about. As long as you send them personalized email many of them will talk about your story if you create something worth talking about. And because blogging is so temporal it is important to push a story to spread it quickly (in other words, nobody wants to blog about a story that is 3 days old unless they have something unique to add).

Link exchange requests go nowhere, but if you offer something that people feel is of value they will link.

I get many link requests, many Digg requests, many requests for feedback, and many other announcement type requests. Many people also let me know how much money they are making. One of the biggest differences between top earners and those just getting by is a lack of shame ... a willingness to ask for favor after favor. Some of the top name SEOs / marketers / bloggers are labeled as such due to nepotistic marketing. You wouldn't know it by asking them, but if you are sorta in on some of the ideas, create some of the ideas, market some of the ideas, and see good ideas go nowhere while bad ideas spread you start to notice some of the patterns.

If you do not have much of a brand you can't be risk adverse if you are hoping to build a brand or exposure. Shame is for sissies. Targeted personalized emails are for profit.

On top of targeted emails there are many other ways you can push your message out there:

• buy AdSense ads targeted to specific bloggers

• buy ReviewMe ads on channels you want to be seen on (I have equity in ReviewMe, but have bought many ReviewMe reviews myself)
• buy Feedvertise ads in feeds targeted to bloggers
• buy targeted interstitial ads on AdBrite
• participate in forums, social news sites, and other community sites
• ask for feedback from industry experts and let others feel they have ownership in the idea or exclusive on the news

Think of how many CDs AOL has sent you. Most any business of scale used some amount of push marketing to gain it.

Many people dole out information with deceptive intent, or to push their own agenda. Recently I created a contest to rank for Dave Pasternack, and so far the results have been quite revealing. Where you rank for generic terms does not matter much if you are looking for good SEO clients, but to say SEO is of limited value across the entire spectrum is dishonest. As NFFC said:

I think the root of the problem is the fact that SEO is very difficult to scale. By that I mean that SEO is a craft best practiced by a small highly motivated team, it doesn't lend itself to a production line approach. That stands equally for those SEO's working inhouse as it does for those consultants plying there wares. Now David isn't a complete idiot, to his credit did-it have plenty of years experience of having their clients bitched slapped all over the SERP's by kids in basements. He knows better than anyone that SEO doesn't "scale".
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So I think the general reason that people are pissed off with David is that instead of him holding did-it's hands up and saying "we don't have the management skills to be able to offer SEO services to our customers", he instead tries to make out that SEO is not a good choice for his clients and that they need PPC. That implies a readiness to be economical with the truth and a lack of ability to be critical of your own companies short comings that, imho, doesn't bode well for those looking to do business with his company.

I realize that a large part of pushing a profitable company is market differentiation, but if you have to lie about the viability of a competing field to push your current business model that is shifty at best. And if you are using the media to spread your misinformation that is blatantly wrong, and you should be called out for it.

Since the contest has started Did It has done the following:

• spoke of protecting Google's purity

• begged for links by offering to donate money to the American Cancer Association
• put up a t-shirt page on Cafepress that links to David's biography page
• linked to David's profile from Kevin's blog
• linked to David's profile page sitewide on Did It
• created duplicate content

Lets run through those one at a time.

Protecting Google's purity: What makes this claim so entertaining is that David Pasternack wasn't ranking #1 for his own name. How a person calls SEO garbage without even ranking for their own name is beyond me. I rank in the top 10 or 20 for words like Aaron or Wall, and am the 5 results for Aaron Wall.

On top of that, PPC people believe you can buy any term you see fit. How can they believe in protecting Google's purity, especially if the consultants also push paid inclusion?

American Cancer Association: You have to throw the cancer card to rank for your own name? That is pretty sick. What do you do if you are asked to compete in a competitive marketplace? Talk down SEO? Oh yeah, I forgot...

T shirt and blog links: If you have been doing decent SEO, and SEO is a one time event, then why the need to come up with these techniques to get a few more links?

Sitewide Link: You are going to change your entire site structure based on a silly $1,000 contest? Sounds a bit reactive for a forward thinking marketing company, isn't it? Hopefully you give your clients more holistic and forward looking advice.

Duplicate Content: Creating a near identical second profile page is lame. And maybe an effective strategy if it were a few years ago, but not for today.

The terms that are worth more than any others, as a branded person who frequently speaks to the media, are your company name and your name. But to already have mainstream media exposure and STILL need to use all of those gimmicks to (hopefully) rank for your own name is pathetic. Ranking should be a given.

Notice how reactive Did It was to a silly $1,000 contest. Clearly SEO isn't a one time thing, or they did a bad job of SEO on their site.

SEO Question: I have been submitting my articles to article directories and submitting my site to directory after directory, but I am not getting anywhere in the search results. What should I do to promote my SEO site and services?

Answer: Rankings do not matter.

The first thing you have to understand about getting good SEO clients (as in clients actually worth having) is that ranking is not the key to getting good clients. Building trust is the key. In fields which have a bad reputation (especially ones where there is high value and a lot of competition) you need to do more than just rank to sell. Here are four examples to back up this point of view.

• Ranking for SEO Book sends me far more traffic than ranking for SEO. Most generic searches in the SEO industry are automated traffic, competitive research, and low quality leads.

• When SeoBook.com did not rank for SEO Book for a while during an aggressive algorithm update that filtered out sites with too much similar anchor text my ebook sales were 85% of their prior month volume. Imagine selling almost the exact same amount of an ebook about ranking in search results when you don't even rank for your own brand name. That shows that my sales come mostly from recommendations, not search results.
• ClientsideSEM is a new site and we have not marketed it aggressively, and the site does not rank for many keywords, yet we already get more leads than we can possibly handle.
• I ranked in the top 10 for search engine marketing a few years ago and got very few leads from it. I didn't start getting many leads until I wrote a popular article about the Google Florida Update. Oddly enough, my rankings were worse when I was getting those leads, but because people were reading my stuff and talking about me I got more leads than I knew what to do with.

As an SEO you don't build enough trust just by ranking. And you don't build trust (or rankings) by getting an unlimited supply of garbage links on the edges of the web. The key to picking up clients is to be seen where the potential clients are. Participate in the active parts of the web and be seen as an expert. Submit articles to sites like WebProNews.

Target YOUR Audience:

Pick your audience and appeal to their interests. And while not all traffic is created equal you do not have to target Digg if you are looking for clients, it is easy to bias your demand toward the target market.

If you can come up for reasons people would want to talk about you then you will get more exposure than you can handle. There is still a lot of opportunity out there. For example, you can commission a study of fortune 500 websites to see which of them are using cloaking or IP delivery, and then market the hell out of it. If you do a good job a few weeks later you are suddenly one of the experts of SEO for fortune 500 websites.

Making the Invisible Visible:

SEO is largely painted as a bad hated field and SEO services are often viewed as an invisible service. If you know how to get people to talk about your brand and SEO you should be good at getting people to talk about other topics (for your clients) as well.

If you know how to make the invisible visible you have an endless supply of affordable quality links at your disposal.

Go Offline:

And if you go to conferences and meet people in person it is far easier to build a solid trusting relationship. That is where the best potential SEO clients are, as they have capital, knowledge, and an interest in the topic. If they have enough resources to attend a conference they probably can afford to hire a good SEO too.

Are you suffering from the Google Sandbox, the -30 penalty, the -950 penalty, too many reciprical link partners, an anchor text or link spam related penalty, duplicate content issues, or the latest algorithm, search index, or quality update? It may not be what you think. DigitalGhost recently described Google's most common SEO related penalty:

Let me tell you about the most common penalty Google uses.

It doesn't have a catchy name, and people generally refuse to talk about it because this particular penalty requires taking responsibility. It's much easier to blame the +-30 penalty, the Sandbox or the new 950 penalty than it is to accept that you've been nailed with the most common penalty of all. What is it you ask?

It's the My Site Sucks Ass And Google Just Figured It Out penalty.

I have a theory that for most people it is easier to create something worth marketing than it is to push something of no value. And that is probably one of the hardest things to get around as an SEO, because SEO can make it seem addictive that we can influence markets without creating real value, but the people who make growing income each and every month are generally those who have at least one real site of real value. Sure you can use SEO to boost it, but it works best if the SEO is done in conjunction with other marketing and real market integration.

It sorta ties in with that whole how easy is it to clone your business concept I recently mentioned. If what you are doing is easy to clone then why not think of a way to add value and make it harder to clone. Sometimes that added value can be just slapping on a few marketing hooks, other times it might be listening to the needs of the market, or commoditizing the business models of competitors.

Recently a friend of mine launched a site and I got them to the top 20 using the general SEO techniques I can apply to any site, but I had them read that clone post and they told me brilliant ideas they could do to add value to their market by commoditizing people who do not even realize they are in the same market. If your marketing strategy is just SEO eventually you lose out when an SEO aware competitor cares about their market and/or uses other marketing techniques.