Below you find interesting Reports from other Search Engine Experts !
Why Getting Top-10 Search Engine Rankings Is More Difficult Today Than Last Year
by Mike Adams
It's a brave new search engine world in 2001, and getting top positions is both more difficult and more valuable than last year...
If you've been shopping the search engine placement industry, you're probably finding plenty of companies that are very affordable but for some reason never seem to deliver on their promises. And the companies actually delivering results cost more today than they did last year. What's happening here?
The companies with the low prices, it turns out, are selling yesterday's tactics. Those tactics don't work today, because the search engines have changed over to a 3rd-generation algorithm that uses popularity to largely determine rankings.
It has made doorway pages, cloaking, keyword stuffing and other techniques obsolete. Companies can still sell those techniques at low-dollar prices, of course, but they're only selling hype, not reality. Buying services from those
companies is kind of like buying "X-Ray Glasses" out of the back of a comic book.
Real-World Solutions
To really get ranked high for a particular keyword phrase, you have to have two things:
1) An optimized page with the keyword in your title and text
2) Higher popularity for that page than the other listings in the search engines
That's all there is to it.
Once you have an optimized page, all you need is sufficient popularity to beat the competition.
But where does that popularity come from?
It comes from other websites that link to yours. Those other websites have to collect their own popularity, too, or else their links are powerless. Google has pioneered this system, where the quality of the hyperlink from one page to another determines how much popularity is being gained. Getting top rankings today is harder than it was last year because getting popularity is harder than creating doorway pages. So the costs are rising. But at the same time, top positions on the search engines are becoming more valuable because more people are using search engines than ever before. So a top-10 ranking can bring you more traffic than ever before, but it's also going to take more effort to get there.
More Competition
Top search engine positions are also harder today thanks to the increased awareness of the value of achieving top positions. There are far more people competing for top keywords today than just one year ago, and that makes the competition stiff.
This is evident in the rising bids
for keywords on GOTO.com, the pay-for-position search engine. Some keywords are commanding more than three dollars per click! That's like paying $1,000 for a mere 333 pageviews on your site.
But the fact that companies are paying these fees indicates it's worth it. When you have a properly-targeted message and a produce or service of value, attracting a highly-qualified lead may be worth $1.00 or $2.00 or even $3.00.
Properly-conducted search engine optimization
, by the way, brings you highly-targeted traffic at well under $1.00 per click, on average. This makes it a real bargain, but it also indicates that it's unreasonable to expect 100,000 hits from spending a mere $1,000 on popularity efforts.
It's a brave new search engine world in 2001, and getting top positions is both more difficult and more valuable than last year. By definition, that makes it harder for smaller companies to get in, helping larger companies occupy the top
spots on the search engine results (after all, they can better afford to fund the efforts needed to get there). But smaller companies can still compete by using highly-targeted keywords which take much less effort to achieve top spots for.
So whether you're
a large company looking to dominate a competitive keyword or you're a smaller company looking to carve out a small, profitable niche, search engine placement strategies still offer real-world solutions that can bring you targeted traffic at very competitive rates. | 
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