What should you invest to get top rankings?  The investment you need to make depends on several factors.     By John Bolduan RealWebMarketing.com

Top rankings on the search engines are on almost everyone's mind who has a website. People would like to see their site at the very top of the Google or Yahoo results page. Now we all know that everyone can't be there so there is some jockeying for position. Many companies believe that they must buy their way to the top with a pay-per-click advertising model which can create some quick sales. Other websites rely on the natural search engine results. Both these are valid avenues for being found online, but is the cost too prohibitive and the entry into optimization too difficult to overcome financially?

It can be very costly to get top rankings in search results but the question to ask is what methods will give me a return on my investment? You should know that most people that are online these days know the difference between an advertisement and natural search engine rankings. And because of that, people gravitate to the natural results 75% of the time. It's a fact that's been proven through market research. This makes a pay-per-click ad campaign alone, a poor way to penetrate the marketplace. It also makes it easy for someone brand new to outbid you on a keyword at will. If 75% of the people are clicking on natural results, then it would make sense to put more investment into making your website appear in the top rankings, wouldn't it?

There are a lot of search engine optimization companies out there. Some are large and some are small and they have no standard price structure. Some are very expensive where you might spend $50,000 - $100,000 and others where they offer guaranteed top rankings for $300. I would suggest that the high dollar company will feed you with endless statistics, concepts to confuse you but should get results. The low dollar outfit is as cheap as they sound. That's why we offer several priced packages of quality investment in top rankings. It's kind of like a buffet style that fits most budgets of small to medium size businesses. Now any of these options might get you results, but when making an investment for online top rankings, look at the mid-range price investment for long term view without regrets of spending too much or too little.

Here are a couple of suggestions for making an investment into better search engine results.

• Make an optimization budget for the coming year and stick to it. You budget for other forms of exposure like yellow pages, newspaper, and other media, why not create a budget for top rankings online? As a starting guideline, your budget should begin as 1% of total sales revenue. Make sure as you see results, increase your budget accordingly.

• Top rankings online are great but you must have a sales goal too. Set a sales goal! A reputable search optimization company should be able to give you a very rough idea as to the sales increase you might see when you get certain search engine results. This does depend on a few other factors, such as website usability and product or service, so it is a rough estimate. When all this is factored together you should be able to determine a return on investment.

• See if you can do some of the work yourself while hiring a consultant for some of the more important aspects of a project. This could lower your investment cost or stretch out your budget to get more done.

There is no cheap way to get top rankings unless you do it yourself and that has a big learning curve. There are some pitfalls to avoid too, so it's probably more cost effective to have an expert do it for you than suffer some serious mistakes that could get you banned from search engines.