When discussing search engine placement and marketing options with clients and prospects, we’re often asked “How can I get into the Top 10 results at Google?” or “Can you guarantee me placement?”

The short answer to both questions is the same: “No company can guarantee you specific placement in search engines.”

Our colleagues in the web development and marketing worlds probably already know this, but clients often don’t and it’s not said often enough by people selling search placement and marketing.

In the interest of conserving your time, I’ll refer you to these resources on search engine basics - Wikipedia’s Search Engine Placement entry and Search Engine Watch - and say this: Any business that guarantees you a specific search engine ranking is either not telling whole the truth or not showing you the caveats in their offering.

This is because “natural” or “organic” search results are determined by a secret formula used by search engines. Since each engine’s formula is secret, there’s no way anyone can guarantee a particular placement using it. Search engines make this even trickier by tweaking their formulae regularly (some as often as monthly).

Even though search positioning is a moving target, that doesn’t mean that it’s fumbling in the dark. The industry knows some things that search engines look at to rank sites (just not how much weight each element is given). These things include: how long a site has been online, the quality of the code, the frequency of updates, the text of the site, links to the site from other sites, and, though less so for Google these days, meta tags.

Even with this knowledge, search placement and marketing is more art than science. A campaign to achieve great natural search placement takes time, usually months or more. Search engine placement is an ongoing process that requires tweaking text and links, generating new links at other sites, experimenting with new techniques, and more. It’s not something you can do just once.

Search engine placement and marketing is a complex task. And it can pay huge dividends for your business. But be aware: when someone is telling you just what you want to hear about it - that you can get the ranking you want, guaranteed, and that it will happen quickly - back away. They can’t really deliver what you need.

P.S. - There is one way to come closer to a solid guarantee of placement in search results. That’s by paying for placement using pay-per-click ads (a great tool, by the way). More on those another time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 9:30 am and is filed under Deep Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.