Once upon a time the web was an easy place to get ranked in. Pre Google you have Lycos, Yahoo & Msn. All you had to do was throw up an internet site fill the page with the keywords you want to rank for, and I mean over stuff the page, then the search engines would blindly send you mobs of traffic.
How times and seo has changed. After Google came in and shaked up the entire industry with their relative search results and focus on quality, all the spam practices of old got kicked to the kerb. Don\’t misunderstand me there are many spam practices still in operation today, it is simply that you won't overtly get away with them.
Nowadays Google are still the king\’s of search and Google dish outs for about 60% of successful website's traffic levels. The stress these days is on quality, links and trust. There are additional factors like how frequently you update your website and the quality of the sites that link to you. The world of seo consultants is know much more of a tactical pursuit. The web has grown to maybe 100 times what it was in the 90\’s so it\’s harder to rank.
There are also tons of new web properties like web 2.0 sites and bookmarking websites. You can use these to your advantage. Or even better you can use services like ping.fm to automate the process for you. If you can automate your seo as much as feasible you can rank in a faster and easier fashion.
Many enterprises contract out their optimization work to web design firms, seo consultants or seo pros from India or The Phillipines. The labour is much less expensive there and the standard of work is excellent. The businesses that wish to excel on the internet in the 21st century are serious about their seo efforts. That's the way of the future.