Search engine placement services is getting it thougher and thougher everyday. Not because search engine placement services are out of fashion, but the skills needed to achieve a high search engine ranking today as opposed to how it was 3-4 years ago are widely different.
Today the most important part of your search engine optimization strategy is to have amazing PR and a staff that thinks SEO. The programmers need to know about onsiteoptimization from the start, especially if you are setting up an ecommerce search engine optimization strategy. Here its crucial that the gigantic productdatabase gets displayed in a search engine friendly way and that the customers has a lot of incentives to post the products on other pages giving relevant backlinks with good and varied anchor texts.
The content writers needs to have a good knowledge about writing search engine friendly texts, its not such a hard thing to do but few newspapers for instance practice it.
But above all, PR, PR and PR. Getting written about is simply king. Google places a much higher emphasis on authority sites these days and the only way to get in there is to produce great PR stunts.
So forget about catalogue submission services, cloaking and spamming techniques and start tending to the blogger community, media and send your programmers and webdevelopers to a 3-5 day SEO course.