Yesterday I posted some comments on the complexity of organic search engine optimization. I tried to make the case that completing a basic site optimization is (theoretically) easy, but delivering the intended results - the maximum possible amount of organic search engine traffic – is extremely difficult. Marketers need to stop buying search engine optimization and SEO’s need to stop selling or promising site optimization, and both need to start (respectively) buying and selling results.

A few related thoughts:

1. I believe that ‘SEO is easy’ in the way and context I described yesterday, but Danny Sullivan makes a cogent point in saying that ‘it is rocket science if you know nothing about it.’ While the basics of search engine optimization can be, as I am occasionally fond of saying, be written on the back of a business card, the painfully obvious fact is that the vast majority of web site developers and owners are clearly oblivious to these basics.
   
   Moreover, implementation of these principals once you do know them does seem to confound otherwise intelligent people more often than not. And there are certainly way more exceptions to the basic rules than basic rules themselves. Hence the addition of the parenthetical (theoretically) into today’s summary of yesterday’s point. Maybe it's not so easy.
   
   
2. The SEO industry is effectively crippled by a horrible lack of measurements and tools. Neither the engines nor the analytics companies treat organic ranking like an important metric. In fact, for reasons both good and bad Google and the others make it very difficult to track search engine result page rankings – doing so is in effect an illegal activity.
   
   Sure there are a half-dozen 'SERP reporting' utilities out there - but until the engines sanction, or sell, legitimate rights and methods to adequately check results for large numbers of keywords building such tools are just plain bad investments for serious developers. Notice that Adwords and Google Analytics will tell you dozens of things about how your paid ads are doing, and effectively nothing about your organic rankings. Until paid advertisers start request (or better yet demanding) vastly improved organic reporting we're probably not going to get anywhere.
   
   Additionally, I’ll renew my call for the engines to pass along in their referrer data the exact position number in the results where the clicked listing appeared. I just want them to tag the following on the end of the referring URL: ?serp=14 to tell us that the organic click was generated by a listing currently ranking 14th in their results. They could do this easily and it would be a great first step toward meaningful organic reporting. Think a report showing how much more money was being made off of top 5 results than page 5 results would motivate some SEO attention, effort, and spending?

Thoughts on paid search and the PPC vs SEO comparison tomorrow.