While no one can guarantee a high ranking in the search engines, there are things that can be done to help you achieve as high a ranking as possible within your industry and among your competitors.

There are really two alternative to achieving ranking in the top three search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN (all others are secondary in terms of their share of the search market). You can Pay or Play!

ONE APPROACH: Buy Your Ranking
How you actually buy your ranking is different for each search engine; and, of course, you'd pay for each one separately. Let's take Google, for example. You may bid on various search terms and pay Google a fee each time someone clicks on your "ad" in the right sidebar of a Google search when that search term is used. The amount of the fee will vary, day by day (depending upon how many competitors also bid and how much they bid); and the amount you decide to pay per click will determine how high your 'ad' is placed (or not) in Google's right sidebar listings for the search term. If your bid is not competitive, your 'ad' may be listed down on page 10 or 50 or 100.

The more popular the search terms (key words) on which you bid, the more well-funded competitors you'll encounter, the more they'll bid, and the more you'll have to bid to compete. We're talking dollars per click-through in many cases. If a searcher clicks on your ad, your account is debited -- whether or not they contact you, do business with you, etc.

So you can see that this becomes very expensive very quickly. This requires almost constant monitoring and re-bidding to stay competitive; and the minute you decide not to continue bidding/paying, you are gone from the search listings.

This approach best serves site-owners with large marketing budgets if they have someone on staff whose job is to constantly attend to the process, and/or in cases of a well-funded short-term-use site or time-sensitive site that needs to get in front of a lot of people very quickly.

A BETTER APPROACH: “Organic” Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

With this option, you do not pay the search engine at all for your listing.

To be successful at this, your choice and treatment of site layout, text, links and graphics must be tightly coordinated around the term or phrase for which you wish to rank. If you choose to rank for multiple terms/phrases, each should relate to a separate page or group of pages. These phrases should be derived from Internet research to determine terms/phrases that are BOTH the most popular AND those most (really) often used by web-searchers. Your website’s copy must then be developed around "statistical keyword density" and something called "latent semantic indexing" -- two of a number of criteria used by Google, Yahoo, MSN to decide your SE ranking.

In addition to "pleasing the search engine gods" with professionally-crafted content, you need to have a good supply of IN-COMING links (from other sites -- not just any sites but sites that the popular search engines also rank highly). These need to be from other sites that are "deemed relevant" to your site (i.e., the search engines look at their search terms and their indexed content and determine whether there is some valid relationship to yours). Warning: Bopping around the Web and listing your site on every "link farm" site you can find (or worse, using an automated service that says they'll link you to 10,000 sites) will cause the search engines to DROP you.

One last point: Search engines exist to provide a quality service - meaning they are committed to pleasing those that use them for searching by always offering good quality results -- relevant websites that match the search criteria and meet the searchers' needs. They don't need to please all the millions of us who seek to be listed in their indexes; and, thus, they don’t care whether we’re happy or not. So, possibly the most important requirement when trying to get a high ranking is to have LOTS of interesting content pages -- articles, etc. -- that are entirely relevant to the search terms that your site is designed for. The more pages of such content, contained within your site, the higher your ranking will be. (Unfortunately, many people try to do this by adding a collection of good copy in PDF format because they feel it is more flexible than web pages. However, the search engines can't "read" PDF files, so all that good content is totally ignored in the ranking process).

CONCLUSION
To reach high ranking in the major search engines requires investment (time, energy and money) – whether you buy your rank or achieve it through a professionally-optimized website. It also requires a commitment because the need to balance your site to both please the search engines and speak to your site-visitors often requires painful choices. You might have great, creative web page copy that is professionally designed to WOW your visitors and motivate them to do business with you. But, unless it is keyword dense and crafted to meet the search engine guidelines, it is not helping your efforts to rank well.

BOTTOM LINE
Obviously, this article barely scratches the surface of this topic. Like certain other SEO experts, the Gilman Group has invested in the tools and has developed the expertise to do professional organic search engine optimization with copywriting, coding, link-building etc. In fact, increasingly more of our clients are getting serious about doing this as the struggle to rank in the search engines becomes more and more important and difficult to achieve. It IS time consuming, and it is something that requires on-going work because the search engines change their criteria constantly. SEO professionals are positioned to stay on top of that.

You might wonder what sort of success companies can really have in terms of search engine placement. The following are a few examples of where the Gilman Group’s clients rank in Google as of February, 2009 (please contact us for more such results):

If you believe that you need better search engine ranking and placement and you wish to commit to making that happen, then we can help you to set your goals and achieve them by working together. Please contact us today. We look forward to adding your site to our list of high-placing websites and watching you grow.

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This article is the property of the Gilman Group, and it may be shared provided this block is included and proper credit is given. Pam Hoffman is the owner of the Gilman Group, Web Presence and Marketing firm in Glen Rock, PA. (www.gilmangroup.com). Their clients span the globe and come from many different industries. If you are considering a new website or a website makeover, consider the Gilman Group (800-317-5145).