The problem, of course, is that EVERYONE wants to be #1 in all
the search engines. This deserves more space and time than we
can give it, but here is some information to manage your expectations.
For almost any keyword or phrase on the major search engines
there are thousands or millions of sites vying for just the first
10 places on the first page. Are you really devoting all your
promotion time to beating those kinds of odds?
No one on the internet can guarantee first page results. And
everyone on the internet can guarantee first page results. If
I go to Yahoo.com and search for 'officeswithoutwalls.ca' (my
website), I get to be #1 on Yahoo, http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=officeswithoutwalls.ca&ei=UTF-8&fr=fp-tab-web-t&cop=mss&tab=.
However, almost no new customers would search for the name of
my company, so that #1 ranking does me no good to attract new
customers. I need to be able to rank well on search terms that
visitors actually do searches for, and that is tougher and can't
be guaranteed. Why can't it be guaranteed?
(a) Because every search engine has a different algorithm. You're
almost always going to do better on one engine than another because
the algorithm matches your site characteristics better.
(b) because search engines change their algorithms. Google does
on a regular basis, and they change their indexes. It's called
the 'Google Dance' and it effects their search engine rankings
everytime they do it, and they do it regularly, http://dance.efactory.de/.
Yahoo majorly changed their algorithm on February 18, 2004, and
it rocked a lot of search engine rankings, http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3314171.
(c) because a lot of search engines results are determined by
bidding on ranking, and your competitors can outbid you. We can
get you in the first page for many search engines, but it requires
consistent work to STAY there because your competitors may continue
to outbid you. And eventually it doesn't make economic sense to
bid on that phrase. If the phrase 'web design' costs about One
Dollar Fifty Cents per click and if it takes 100 clicks to make
a sale (it does) and my average revenue per sale is Two Hundred
Dollars, that doesn't make economic sense, so I must look at alternative
ways to attract customers.
(d) because for one major search engine (dmoz.org), humans decide
who gets in and not. I can submit your site, and submit it well,
but have no real control over when or if it is included.
There are a number of things that we can do to make your website
palatable to search engines. We also have a lot of free information
about search engine optimization on
this page and our costs
for certain search engine optimization work are here. We warn
you against anyone who PROMISES certain results in the search
engines; and we will be happy to work with you in this matter
if you would like for us to.
