In this new age of Social Media consideration, geographical personalization and web history metrics all climbing their way up the importance ladder in search engine algorithms internet users are presented with a much more personalized and relevant search experience. Out with the days of keyword-stuffing webmasters with aged url's dominating the top of search results. In with the days of your site being on top because you have the most similarities in social media circles, are just down the road from the searcher and have a similar site to websites a user has visited before.
Old School SEO
The old rules of thumb to get a website to the top of the search engines would be to maximize on-page seo and accrue the quantity of authoritative in-bound links. If you covered your bases with keyword rich and relevant content, a properly structured website and had amassed the right kind of links from high page ranking sources you could guarantee that Jim and Sally would both see your website as #1 for a particular keyword. It's now much different than that. That top spot and the order of the pages listed on a search engine results page can and will vary from user to user depending on many more personalized variables. From an end user point of view the logic in this is beautiful. Your search results are tailored to YOU and your history of internet usage.
This has become somewhat maddening for webmasters though. Any internet marketer who promises a #1 position for a certain search term is completely full of shit or not yet educated on these findings. It's impossible as each users search results are becoming more and more personalized to them. Even the practice of keyword monitoring needs to be scrutinized. This makes it tricky to prove the value of search engine optimization work. I picture webmasters world wide shaking in their shorts wondering how they can justify their price tags now without being able to honestly say that they got a site to rank 4 for EVERYONE with a particular key-phrase.
Spreading your Digital Footprint
I still believe in all of the best practices for search engine optimization. I still believe in building back links. These all still matter. There are just more things now to consider when trying to grow your search engine presence. You need to blog. You have to make a Facebook fan page. It's necessary to Tweet, to make videos for YouTube, put your images on Flicker, create slides for SlideShare