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)
What yahoo says
What Google says
What MSN says
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.