Just came to the realization in November & December of 2010, that the easy days of top search engine ranking via good SEO have vaporized. Not knocking doing good optimization, but the notion that someone can just waltz to the top rankings by SEO are becoming more and more of a pipe dream these days. With the exception that the website owners put for the most effort and the most generous good content. Unfortunately, there's only about 1 in 80 websites where the owner has the will, the desire or the funds to expend on this anymore. This means that after any good SEO, most website owners are no more certain of good rankings than rolling the dice. Think about it ... If there were 10 sites in your niche 6 years ago. It was easy to be on page one. And not too hard to be the top 3, or wrangle for the top 3 spots. But suppose there are 100 to 200 websites in your niche now, and all the owners are paying for plenty of SEO work, who is dumb enough to believe they all stand a chance of even being on page one?