Every few months – whenever some change occurs to one of the major search engines (usually Google), a lot of people start blogging that “the end is nigh” for search engine optimization and SEO companies in general.  This has happened over algorithm changes in the past and more recently with personalization, localization and of course Google’s new Universal Search.

Here’s the reality - there are two ways to be found in a search engine (localized, personalized, universalized, or otherwized) - 1) luck or 2) optimization.  And no matter what anyone tells you, this ain’t gonna change.

Lot’s of people can be lucky with their web sites; but its not really luck, it’s more like “accidental optimization”.  More often than not, those sites that are doing well in the search engines without any explicit optimization are there because they did the correct things implicitly.  They were already associated with an authority site or two.  They had good content.  They had a clean design.  Lot’s of people linked to them for what they said or who they are. So on and so forth.

But many companies… and I mean many – do not get it right the first time and need professional help (in many ways).   Most of the time – even the basics are wrong - architecture, design, content, etc.  So if it was tough before to get a decent ranking – do you think that these companies will find it easier with any of the new SERP “views” (e.g. Personalization)?

I would argue that Optimization is more important than ever!

All the changes currently under way are simply different ways to “slice and dice” the ever-increasing number of web pages in the various search engine databases to try and improve relevance to the individual searcher.  Who doesn’t want that?  If we can help our clients make sure their pages are only being shown to a more qualified searcher, then this is good for them too!

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