Among the many acronyms floating around the alphabet soup are the three letters SEO. They stand for search engine optimization or how to improve your ranking in search results. The idea is that since people will choose one of the first few links in the search results, it is important to be one of those first few results. Yet many companies don’t even show up on the first page of results even when people do a search for the company.

So if the goal is to be one of the top results then how do you get there. That is the art of search engine optimization. Your ranking is based on a number of different factors. In the old days all you had to do was put some keywords in your header meta tags and register with Yahoo. (You still have to do this, but with Google and Bing as well.)  Now your rankings are also determined by links to your site and programs from search engines that scan your site checking for relevant content.

The last bit sounds easy enough, but all our shiney new tools don’t always play together so well. With the rise of database driven content management systems (CMS) anyone can populate a website without knowing anything about HTML. Unfortunately, many of the pages generated by these content management systems are not easy for the search engine programs to scan. (So you have an easy way to post to the web, but at the expense of Google knowing what you are posting and if it should affect to your ranking.)  Luckily there are tools and tricks to help the search engine programs index your site and boost your rankings.

The other thing that helps your rankings is links to and from your site. Imagine you are a plumber and your site links to your local plumbers association. Since you are a member, the association links back to you (and any other plumbers who are members). Each of these connections is helping your ranking by adding weight and credibility to your keywords. At least that is in theory how it works. Unfortunately some bad people figured out that you could make a bunch of bogus websites that interlinked to each other and boosted their rankings even though the sites were not actually relevant in content. This is called link farming and it is looked upon very badly by search engine companies. How bad? Like being banned from search result bad.

So you have a website and you want people to find you when they do a web search. You are not sure how to get better results and decide to pay someone to boost your results. There are lots of people out there billing themselves as search engine optimization experts. How do you find one that will get you results? First realize the search results change as content and accessibility to the content on pages is made available. One month you could be the first result and the next you are the third result. Even by doing nothing you could end up back at number two or slipping onto the second page. You have to accept that being number one requires always have fresh and relevant content for the search engine programs and a bit of luck. If you want to be the first result of a search then you have to invest a significant time to get there and stay there.  If someone says they can guarantee you a number one result always then they might be doing something that could hurt you later.  It is best to find someone who can explain to you what they intend to do and gives you realistic expectations.  You don’t have to be the first on the results page, just one of the first.