Search engine placement myths and the truth.  You can't actually place your website in the search engine results.   By John Bolduan RealWebMarketing.com

There are a variety of terms out there that try to describe what a search marketer does. There is everything from search optimization, web marketing or some such phrase to make you list higher in search results. The one that I find to be the most curious is the term search engine placement. I think people believe that you can place a site at the top of the search rankings just by doing a few changes to your website. Now that may happen as a result, but most of the time it does not. That's why the words search engine placement don't make any sense, it's a myth. No one is able to place you anywhere in natural search results willfully. The only way it is done is through hard work and effort to make your website a valuable resource for searchers. 

There are marketing companies that claim they can deliver such results guaranteed. Beware of people that make these claims because this means they may use tactics that could negatively effect your website in the search engines. The idea that some company is trying to beat a search engine algorithm to place a website on the first page should be something you should avoid. The major search engines hate this kind of tactic because they feel it skews their relevant results. They don't like their results being messed with and they will ban some sites from their databases.

That's why search engines are such a great tool. They give the searcher the ability to find what they're looking for based on a relevancy algorithm. It's the algorithm that decides what deserves a high search engine placement, not humans. So understand that search engines want to produce the most relevant results for people using their service. This means people will use them more often and they can charge more for advertising and make deals for other technology. That's how they make money, it's the searcher not the company who has a website and wants a high ranking. All they care about is relevancy, that they're delivering the best content and that the searcher finds what they're looking for quickly.

There is another way that search engine placement becomes a meaningful marketing tactic. That's in the pay-per-click advertising arena where you pay for a listing on the first page of a search engine. These paid ads are not in with the natural search results, but are to the side, bottom or even at the top of the page on occasion. These paid ads create the illusion that these sites are relevant too, even when they may have very little to do with the search just performed. This is where true search engine placement can take place. Of course this has a cost and a return on investment to consider. It also has a lower click through rate by far than natural search results. But for a quick way to increase exposure, it sometimes makes sense to employ this strategy.

Now I know this all sounds like I'm just nitpicking a term that people use to describe search rankings, but it's important to understand the difference. When you understand that search engine placement is based on relevancy, then you can start to create your website, not for search engines, but for the people that are using them. If you take your excellent content and present it in such a way that searchers will find it useful, then you will have online success. The search engine placement is based on many factors in the algorithm and all of them are important for a website to rank high.