Guaranteed Search Engine Placement
Myths and Empty Promises

There’s no such thing as a guaranteed search engine ranking. First, the only people who could make such promises are the search engines themselves, and their secrets are closely guarded.

A top 10 Google ranking sounds impressive, especially when it comes with a money-back guarantee. But here’s another reason no one can deliver on such a promise.

Let’s say we’re optimizing 11 sites for the keyword "red cars." Isn’t it clear that at least one of those companies won’t get a top 10 ranking? Someone has to be in eleventh place, right?

And how do we know that the sites already holding the top 10 spots for “red cars” aren’t just the best sites out there about red cars. How can we promise our 11 new clients a specific ranking? We can’t. No one can.

Here are some other myths about search engines and “guaranteed” placement.

A good set of META tags is all there is to getting a good search engine ranking

The META tag is pretty much dead. Several years ago, search engines used to look at keyword META tags because they were a trusting bunch of creatures. They mistakenly believed that people would list keywords that pertained to their product, industry, or service.

Nice thought.

Besides invisible text, the META tag is probably one of the most misused and abused elements. Unscrupulous people – mostly owners of adult sites – loaded the tag with dozens – even hundreds – of words that had nothing to do with their website, all in the name of getting traffic to their site. As if someone looking for ABBA records was going to stop everything to buy a membership to that Big Boob site. It was poor judgment and it killed the use of the META tag.

Today, most search engines just pass them by.

My site needs to be re-submitted on a regular basis to keep its good search engine ranking

This is a money-making scheme on the part of shameless search engine optimization companies and software. In fact, repeat submissions do nothing to improve your rankings. Once your in, a search engine will come back and visit your site often, paticularly if you update it on a regular basis.

Most search engines even ignore the META tags that tell them how often to visit. Unless you tell them to stay out – and some even ignore this – a search engine robot will come crawling when it feels like it.

We only need to do search engine optimization once and we’re finished

Don’t we wish this were true. In fact, we think a top 10 ranking is harder to defend and keep than to get in the first place. Why? Because once you’re at the top, all of your competitors come in and have a look at what you did to get there.

And then, the fighting begins. They update their site, you slip; you update your site, you move up.

Keeping your site at the top is a lot of hard work. You need to constantly write new content for your site, look for new inbound links, and keep on top of the new words and search engines people are using to find you. If you don’t, you’ll slip. We seen a lot of sites fall right off the map because they didn’t heed this warning.

More is better

If 10 META keywords are good, 100 are better; if 10 links are good, 50 are fantastic and on it goes. We seen it time and again. Someone pipes up and says, “Google really likes a good title.” Suddenly, websites start appearing with 16-word titles.

“Search engines really like URLs jammed with keywords separated by hyphens,” and the next thing you know you’re finding domain names stuffed with keywords and hyphens.

It’s almost a given that as soon as someone comes up with a tip to improve your search engine ranking, it will be abused to death. Try and restrain yourself ... more isn’t always better. We like to err on the side of caution, it seems to be doing well for us – and it keeps us off the banned lists.

I’ve got to be big to get good search engine placement

Bullocks! We’ve helped many small companies and freelancers get into the top 10. (Check out what they’re saying about us.)

Instead of cheap tricks, write good quality content for your website. Then you have a good chance of getting good search engine placement.

If you’d like us to take a look at your site and give you an evaluation, we’d be happy to. Our contact information is here.