SEO Speedwagon

I just noticed this posted by Barry Schwartz over at SEL: The UK flavors of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB UK) and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) have joined forces "to establish industry-wide search standards", as they put it in their release on the IAB's UK web site.

Every few years I see this stuff and I try -- really, I do try -- not to by cynical. But trying to qualify and quantify best practices is like sprinting like hell to get to the end of a Mobius strip. Historically, any efforts to define acceptable and unacceptable practices in SEO have been either so rigidly prescriptive as to except significant portions of successful (and lauded) SEO companies, or they've been so toothlessly vague as to allow access to anyone who can forge a backstage pass.

To which of these camps does the IAB/DMA "charter" belong? Judge for yourself: Following (in bold) are the minimum corporate qualifications found in the IAB's charter document (MS Word, 238K), with a little commentary (mine) in italic.

• They must have at least two employees dedicated to search marketing
  Many -- many -- of the industry's best SEOs are one-(wo)man shops.
  
• They must have search engine accreditation (from Google or Microsoft with more to follow) and have received official search engine optimisation (SEO) training as relevant
  That's actually not a bad benchmark. For PPC. How about the other 80% of clicks?
  
• The company must have been trading for 6 months
  I'm not exactly sure what "trading" means, but I think it's a UKism for "having been in business." I certainly concede that most good SEOs have been in business for more than 6 months. But most of the lousy ones have been too.
  
• The company must be a member of either IAB UK, IAB Europe, DMA or Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organisation (SEMPO) or the Association of Business to Business Agencies (ABBA).
  Now we're getting somewhere. Explore the links to the membership pricing levels of the IAB UK, IAB Europe (PDF), DMA, and SEMPO.

I have nothing personally against any of these organizations, but answer this question honestly: With mass adoption of this charter by SEO companies, who benefits more -- these four membership organizations, or companies in search of a reputable SEO firm?

And in case you're still reading, thanks. Here's your reward, pulled from the original charter Word document, and delivered in the world's most accepted currency -- laughter:

Monitoring compliance
The charter will be self-policed by the SEM industry.