That's right, today we aren't going to so much discuss optimization as it's antithesis. Some may wonder what sense this makes. How can one say that the road to higher rankings is built on trying not to rank? In fact, the effort is always to rank highly, it's just the tactics that are a bit different.

Every now and then an event occurs that changes how the SEO community views the way websites are optimized and structures promotions. The purchase of the rights to the Orion Algorithm by Google and equally important, the interest that both Yahoo! and MSN took in the algorithm as they vied for ownership themselves, marks just such an event.

Bill Gates said to Forbes magazine about Orion:

"That we need to take the search way beyond how people think of it today. We believe that Orion will do that."

It's been about two years now that I have wanted to write this article. Why haven't I until now? Conflict of interest. Until recently I'd have been motivated by that necessary evil … getting business. Each time I started writing this article I subconsciously asked myself, "How can I spin this towards Beanstalk?" You can't really begrudge me this. Such is the "curse" of living in a capitalist society. Recently however we have put a hold on taking in new SEO clients. The result: consistent questions regarding who people should choose and what they should look for. And so to kill two birds with one stone, I write this now. The first bird killed is my frustration at not being able to properly write a useful article on what to look for in an SEO without bias. The second bird killed is my wasted time outlining over-and-over what people should seek out. Now I can simply point them to this article.

You've read this far so you're obviously interested in finding out what you should look for in an SEO and what you might want to avoid. So let's get right to it shall we?

... as we know it. On February 2, 2007 Google launched its big push into personalized search results. This was, to many, a dark day as SEO's scrambled to determine exactly what this meant for the industry and for our clients. Different results showing up for different people? What are ranking reports if what you see differs from what I see? Who's right? And of course, how do I prove it?

I'll admit it; my first thoughts at the launch of personalization were not necessarily along the most positive tangents. Upon further reflection (and much of it) and after wading through seven patents to get a better feel for the variables and what they mean (and might mean down the road) I came to one conclusion, coincidentally the same conclusion I consistently come to after each major algorithm update or search technology advancement: Anything that improves the search experience improves the SEO industry. This may seem an obvious statement but when the search engines (especially Google) throw a curve ball at us, one cannot help but worry.

This article will focus on two tangents, what is personalization and how will the SEO industry evolve to accommodation this new feature? The answer to the later is quite clear once one understands how personalized results are created.

Anybody who monitors their rankings with the same vigor that we in the SEO community do will have noticed some fairly dramatic shifts in the algorithm starting last Thursday (July 5th) and continuing through the weekend. Many sites are rocketing into the top 10 which, of course, means that many sites are being dropped at the same time. We were fortunate not to have any clients on the losing end of that equation however we have called and emailed the clients who saw sudden jumps into the top positions to warn them that further adjustments are coming. After a weekend of analysis there are some curiosities in the results that simply require further tweaks in the ranking system.

This update seems to have revolved around three main areas: domain age, backlinks and PageRank.

A few years ago I wrote the article Ten Steps To Higher Search Engine Positioning. The article was well received due to the breakdown of the core requirements for ranking a website being reduced into simple steps. Well today we're going to break it down into 5 steps. Is it even easier to rank a website today than it was a few years ago? More straight forward? Yes. Less time consuming? Not a chance.