If you have been involved in the process of hiring a company to design and manage your website, you've probably seen the ads Guaranteed #1 Ranking! Unfortunately, there are no guarantees in search engine marketing and website promotion. If anyone tells you different, grab your wallet and run.

Let me explain.

Suppose you sell widgets. You want to sell more widgets and the way to do that is to make sure that more people know about widgets and that your store is the place to buy their widgets. You might decide to buy a half-page ad in a national magazine to tell your story. When you place that ad, you are "guaranteed" a specific position. That is because the publisher knows what the magazine's circulation is, who reads it, and which page will feature your ad. They can guarantee all that, because they own the medium.

Search engine marketing is qualitatively different. When you work with a search engine marketing firm to promote your website, they cannot guarantee where your listing will appear because they don’t own the medium. Certainly there are types of online ads where there are guarantees in place. However, these are like traditional media buys where you are working directly with the owner of the medium where the ads will appear. This is not the case when it comes to search engine marketing.

So, the agency that contacted you is going to use the pay-per-click model. Well, you can get close and sometimes get that #1 spot, but they still cannot guarantee your position. The largest and best known pay-per-click ad is Google’s AdWords. One little known element in where your ad appears is not just the price you pay for a given keyword that determines where you will rank, but how often your ad is clicked on that determines which ad will be listed first. Just throwing money at them will not necessarily get you into the #1 spot, although it will get you closer to your competitors.

The bottom line is this: search engine marketing professionals do not own the search engines.

Heck, I could even tell you that you will achieve #1 ranking on a given search engine. I could also tell you that I have Jessica Simpson beating down my door, but neither one is true.

A search engine marketing company can recommend changes to your site that will increase the likelihood of your ranking higher, but that is a long way from a guarantee. If you don't control the medium, you can't guarantee the result. Since your search engine consultant doesn't control the search engine, there is no way they can guarantee your position.

There are many factors that go into where a website is ranked on a particular search engine:

• Design
• Content
• Proper Title Tags
• Inbound Links
• Outbound Links

Each search engine uses different algorithms for determining your sites rank so there are other factors as well, but it really comes down to designing your website so that the code meets current standards and populating that site with well-written content.

Don’t take my word for it. Research it for yourself and start with Google’s webmaster guidelines.

No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
Beware of SEO's that claim to guarantee rankings, or that claim a "special relationship" with Google, or that claim to have a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is by using the page at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. You can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.

Page URL: http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html