I doubt any of the bottom-feeders that email me from foreign lands every day with claims of getting me on top of all search enginges will bother to read this, but it will make me feel better to post it. I now lump those who are making those types of claims in the same category as alchemists with claims of turning worthless metal into gold.  Don't get me wrong, I think there is a time and place for SEO, but the claims being made -- especially for little guy like me -- is ridiculous. 

Maybe I am missing something, but search engines main job is to deliver popular, fresh content to their users. They do this by rating your site as follows:

1. First, the site is rated on site traffic. Those with more hits will rate higher. Period. 
2. Then it is rated on inbound links -- other sites that link to yours.  If you can get a lot of other sites to talk about and link to your site, that increases your rating dramatically.
3. Search engines also rate your site on "freshness of content" which means, all other things equal (or close) a recent blog or forum entry will be rated higher than static content that is a year old.
4. Finally, they factor in the things that the SEO pundits are selling -- properly formatted titles, alt tags on images, meta-tag keywords and descriptions.

In other words, no amount of SEO in the world will get my site to the top of a search list for "Joomla", for instance. I would need to have more volume, fresher content and more external links to my site than all other sites.  For sites of the giants like Apple, CNN and Target, it will matter, but, please, don't email me and tell me you can raise me to the top of all searches that relate to my business with a little reformatting of my site.  It just doesn't work like that.