Top search engine ranking, guaranteed!  Some companies offer this kind of rhetoric, but does it mean anything?     By John Bolduan RealWebMarketing.com

If you've been looking around long enough to get your site a top search engine rankings, then you've probably heard this word guarantee tossed about. There are some search marketing companies that say they can guarantee a top ranking on any of the search engines. Well, a good search marketer can get you higher listings but a guaranteed top spot might include some shady tricks that could get you banned from the search properties. This is what people need to watch out for. Sure, we would all like the #1 position for our website in every way, but is that realistic? I contend that it isn't and those who might offer such things should be avoided.

Honesty is an important part of developing a good search marketing strategy. And the honest truth is we all can't be #1 or there is no such thing as #1! What a lot of these companies do is find some obscure search term that might have no traffic related to it and get you a number one position, big deal! That doesn't mean it's going to pay off for you. Here's what's real. Search engines base their results on much more than what you put on the page. It has to do with where your site is listed, how many relevant links come to you and so on. That being said, no overnight change in a page is going to make that difference. So a long term strategy must be employed with a healthy does of patience. 

When webmasters create a website for themselves or someone else, they believe they are offering the best service, product or information on the web. Really they do. And it may be very good information worthy of a top search engine ranking, but there is one problem. There are millions of other website owners that think the same thing about their site. People will always believe that what they have to offer is the best, that's what makes us human, to believe that we are unique, and we are in some ways. That's where there is tunnel vision. This occurs when we don't consider the true length and breadth of this thing we call the Internet. In fact, no one can get their minds around how big it is. There are so many good offerings and sites worthy of high rankings that it boggles the mind. Admitting that we probably have nothing to offer that is totally unique can start you to the correct mindset that will bring a top search engine ranking.

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 higher ranking, 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. This is why a top search ranking must be cultivated like a garden, not like a chia pet.

When you understand that search engine ranking is based on a relevancy that you can't really manipulate, 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. A top search engine ranking is based on many factors in the algorithm and all of them are important for a website to rank high. That's why it good to find a search marketing firm to help create content that's relevant with the end user.