Bottom line is, this is a myth. No company can guarantee this. The reason being Yahoo, Google and MSN are companies and companies are in business to make money. That is why they all offer their own sponsored links placed at the top or on the side of the search results. This could be pay-per-click, meaning you pay every time somebody clicks on the link to your site or it can be a set monthly fee.

However, with that being said, there are things you can do to help get on the first page of searches.

• Make sure the search terms that you want to be found under is in the text content of your site, preferably the front page. I.e., if you want to be found under "cure for cancer", be sure to have this text in as many places as possible on your site in text format, not image format, (meaning text on a .jpeg or other image type) as web crawlers will not be able to see it.
• The more links you have to your site, the better. This is how web crawlers will find your site. By browsing other sites that are linked to your site, the more links the higher it will go up the rankings.
• Submit your site (when its finished) to search engines. All search engines have a page to do this and it’s free. click here for the three top search engines free submission pages.

The three steps above are ALL a search engine optimizing company will do to your site. If you decide to use a company for this purpose, make sure that is all they do. Below is a list of no-no's when it comes to search engine optimizing.

• Gateway pages: (making pages full of search terms to push you up the ranking)
• Hidden text: (adding text to your page that cannot be seen because it matches the background of your site)
• Layers that cover text: (adding an image over the top of text to conceal it)
• Spam campaigns: (whether this be email or splash pages)

There is no doubt that all these methods work and work well. However, when you get caught (and you will), your site will be dropped from the search results for good. Be sure to ask any company how they are going to get your site to the top of the searches. If they mention any of the above, I strongly recommend hanging up the phone right away. These methods are dishonest. Do you really want to do business with a company that has dishonest practices? There are a lot of companies out there that offer this service and a lot of them will base their fee on performance. This means if you don't get results, you don't pay. Be wary of any company that will charge you for this service up front without any clear contract of what they are going to do.

Note: Google and Yahoo send out their crawlers once per month. This index file changes every month, so some months your site will be listed high and some months it will not. It all depends on your ranking.

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