I was party to an interesting conversation outside the Hilton Hotel in Chicago last week. I was standing beside a friend who is another Search Engine Strategies speaker, talking to a half dozen or so conference delegates, two of whom had specific instructions to seek out the other speaker as a potential vendor. He was turning himself inside-out trying to explain what I had meant when I made the seemingly dismissive comment, “Rankings are so dead dude,” to a potential client of his a few moments earlier.

These sorts of conversations are usually pretty interesting and though each of them is unique, they tend to follow a similar pattern. People attending search marketing conferences are there on their company’s budgets or pay thousands out of their own pockets. They are expected to return with a lot of fresh info that will build their online businesses. When talking to speakers, smarter conference delegates tend to pry as much information as they can.

It takes between 30 – 60 seconds to understand a good business idea. It takes far longer to understand the mechanisms that make an idea into a viable business. Search engine optimization is very much like that. One can explain the basic concept fairly quickly but the details are far more difficult to explain. That’s especially true when the environment search marketers work in evolves as quickly and rapidly as Google does.

Search engine rankings, as a definitive measure of the progress of a search engine optimization campaign went out of style a couple years back but many still believe placement is the ultimate success metric. About three years ago, Google began experimenting with the delivery of search engine results designed to match the interests of unique searchers. Somewhere in the last few months, they became very, very good at it.

Google has gone for personalization of results and that makes everything different. Google draws from factors as divers as user click behaviours, individual bookmark files, previous search history and localized indicators to determine each user’s unique search query results. Underlying personalization of results are localization factors used to create query results produced to feature references that are actually useful to local searchers.

In other words, if you are in Victoria BC and type PIZZA Victoria, you should see a lot of references to pizzerias on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. If you had a favourite pizza place and you clicked that link frequently, that link would likely move upwards in your personalized search results, especially if you spend a lot of time the pizzeria’s web pages.

There are no universal set of search engine rankings. At one time there were only ten top ten results to get to, period. Now there are as many results sets as there are individual users. It took three written paragraphs to give a very basic explanation. Unfortunately, late night conversations at conventions do not allow the luxury of multiple paragraphs.

My friend had gotten to a fine point of frustration when he declared he, ” …would never work with a client whose idea of SEO consisted entirely of chasing after search engine rankings!” Dramatic enough to draw my imagination back into the conversation, my friend was swimming upstream against a flow of out-of-date understandings of what search engine optimization is. A few of the other listeners grasped the implications of personalization but it took several more statements to move the potential client vetting my friend.

As the conversation mellowed down from the precipice my friend’s statement took it to, we started talking about usability, strategic link placement, traffic acquisition and finding ways to appeal to “the right web surfers” as being the new focuses of SEO. By the time we moved from the cold winds of Michigan Ave to the raucous melee of of Kitty O’Shea’s, the conversation had taken us through a short history of Google rankings and two eloquent explanations of a world beyond rankings. Conference conversations are cool.