It’s a valid question. Can SEO Services Really Promise a First Page Ranking? Are you one of those who pay lip service to SEO because it is the thing to do and then complain when Google or Yahoo fail to list any of your webpages in their indices? Do you actually understand what a search engine is and how it works? Do you know what a search term or a keyword is, or how the search engines use them to index your web pages?

If not, don’t feel alone. You are one of the 99% who have no idea what I am talking about. Yet you expect your website to be listed on Google. Don’t you? If so, you had better think again because Google do not list websites. That’s all I am going to say about that, and if you don’t understand, then try entering a search term into Google and examine the results.

The sad fact is that the vast majority of people who try to make money from the internet fail. A lot less than 1 in 100, make more than they spend trying to succeed. To succeed you must learn from those who have done it themselves. I know it sounds trite, but there is no time any more for people to learn ‘through experience’. I learned through experience: I am still paying for that ‘experience’ four years on.

To succeed you must have an open mind. The internet is not a gold mine except for those that persuade you that it is, and then take your hard earned cash to show you how. There is one secret to online success and that is free advertising. I know, I can hear you saying it already! There is no such thing! And you would be right to say so. However, there is cheap advertising: advertising that you pay only to find out how to get it.

That is search engine position for the keywords of your choice! If you appear on the first page of, for example, Google, then you get as much exposure as those that are paying high sums of money to pay for the Adwords adverts that you see on the right hand side of the results page. You appear on the left hand side, and guess where people look for information? Yup, the left hand side! That has been proved. The left side is associated with adverts, and no wonder since the left hand side IS full of adverts!

However, to get on the left hand side of that first page, you have to be visited by the search engine spiders that will crawl your site and determine your listing position. IF you get crawled! That is challenge number 1.

Challenge number 2 is to get listed on the first page for your keyword. To achieve that you have to understand how search engines work. If you do not, then you have very little chance without paying a fortune to SEO companies. IF you learn how to do it yourself, it will cost you nothing. No SEO company can guarantee you a Page 1 listing – unless the keyword they list you for is never used by anybody. I can get a Page 1 listing on any search engine for the keyword ‘ybomang’, but unless that suddenly appears as a character in Harry Potter, nobody will ever search for that. Use it yourself and you will be in position 1!

No SEO company can guarantee a high listing for any but useless keywords. They can ‘improve’ your listing but not provide, as many do, a ‘Top 10’ listing. So do not be misled. What you must do is learn how search engines work, and then apply that knowledge to persuading them to visit one or more pages of your website, and include them in its indices for the search terms, or keywords, that each of your pages is dedicated to.

You must dedicate every individual page on your website to one, and only one, keyword. That keyword must be a search term that you know that is being commonly used by others to find the information that is contained on your web page. You must then provide good informative content on that page that relates to that keyword, and do what you can to attract spiders and make them just love the content on your web page. So much so that they want everybody looking for the information that your page provides to visit it by showing it prominently on the search engine results page.

There are ways of doing that, and you won’t come across them accidentally. You will have to learn them, not pay for them, unless you have a deep pocket since the rules change frequently, and what is optimized today might not be optimized next month! DIY is the buzz word for home improvement, so also make it the buzz word for website improvement. It could earn you more money than a few shelves in your kitchen!

Can SEO Services Really Promise a First Page Ranking? Of course not!
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As a full time article marketer, I get this question a lot. One article gets you two links in the author resource box. You can have both links pointing to the same page, or to different web pages.

When getting back links, be as specific as possible. For instance, if you have 2 links in your author box, you can have 1 link pointing to your homepage, and 1 link pointing to an internal page. The link that’s pointing to the internal page should lead directly to more specific information. Say you are selling a link building ebook. You can have a link that says “link building ebook” in the anchor text and then link directly to that page. Don’t link to the homepage and make the visitor hunt high and low for the sales page.

So, back to the question, how many back links will be enough? The answer to this question depends on a few variables.

1) Competition.

You must first be able to make a quick assessment of the competition. A crude way of doing this is to search for all web pages with your target keyword phrase in the search engine. However, bear in mind that having the phrase in the title doesn’t mean that the site is a competitor. You can’t really know for sure unless you check the backlinks for that web page. If anchor texts for that page is similar to or exactly the same as the target keyword phrase, then you may have a serious competitor. You can try using a Firefox plugin (free) to obtain the information, or use special SEO software.

2) Your keywords.

Many marketers are confused as to which keywords to target. Let’s say you are in the “make money” niche. So should you target “Make Money” or “Make Money Online”? Of course, it’s always easier to rank for “Make Money Online”, so that should be a better choice to start. It is immensely difficult to rank for general keywords because of the great number of competitors. Also, the traffic may not be as targeted as you like because the phrase may be too general.

3) The quality of your back links.

Your back links should ideally come from authority sites. These are domains that are well established on the Internet and their links count a lot. In other words, it’s much easier to rank if you acquire links from these authority sites.

So how do you find authority sites?

Go to your favorite search engine and enter your target keyword phrase. Usually, authority sites rank well in the search results. The second to third page results should give you an indication of the authority of the websites. Also, you may want to rely on other indicators such as Google Page Rank or Alexa Rankings. But bear in mind that none of these indicators are 100% accurate. However, you can rely on them as general guides.

You will only be able to arrive at a reasonably accurate answer only when you have the above information at your finger tips.
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