Search Engine Rankings and Marketing:

High rankings in search engines depend on many different factors and search engines are constantly updating their search criteria to better serve their customers.

First, let me say that there are many companies out there that focus only on search engine marketing and optimization. I, personally, consider this an essential part of the web development process and have worked diligently to become proficient at search engine optimization and marketing. There are essentially two distinct types of search engine marketing companies; 1) Those that charge a flat fee to utilize their specialties for your particular web site without any guarantees regarding site rankings and 2) Those that guarantee a specific ranking for either a flat fee or (more likely) a monthly charge.

The fees for using either type of these search engine marketing companies range from several hundred dollars monthly to as much as several thousand dollars for site optimization. The differences are significant regarding how they each obtain their results and, quite frankly, those that offer a guarantee of particular rankings should simply not be used. The fact is that nobody can guarantee site rankings. However, there are ways to obtain good site rankings very easily. One of those ways is to simply choose a keyword or keyword phrase with little or no competition, this, incidentally, normally means that search customers do not use those keywords or terms to do their searches – that translates to a waste of time and money.

Some of the companies that charge a flat fee for their services do come highly recommended and have obtained some very good results so I am not trying to take away from those companies at all. The reputable companies will work diligently to get the job done and some are very successful, however, if you should decide to invest a substantial amount of money for search engine marketing and optimization then you owe it to yourself to check out the company you are considering.

In defense of the costs of these services, keep in mind that a great deal of research has to be done and constantly updated in order to be successful at search engine marketing. While it may be enough for the average consumer to view rankings using each search engine for competition and rankings, it is necessary for companies that do search engine marketing as a profession to invest in software to check rankings, do research, search for competitive keywords and phrases, and know who the competitor web sites are. Some companies also use additional software to assist in optimizing pages for specific search engines.

Other costs associated include obtaining link exchanges with other web sites that provide similar services and writing web site content. The most important aspect of search engine marketing and rankings is the development of good, quality site content. The only sure fire way to obtain good rankings is to provide good content that people want to read and therefore search for. In order to write content, we must do extensive research on the subject web site and the company along with the product(s) that they offer.

Internet Marketing and Web Site Design Pricing

While, I personally, have clients that have utilized my Search Engine Marketing services as a separate service from their web site design, I prefer to work on the entire web site development process from start to finish (finish is a finite term that really should not be used in the case of web development as it is often necessary to, at a minimum, update content consistently).

Again, in order of importance, I rank the following items of any web site development project as follows:

1. A professional web design interface


2. Optimizing the site pages for better search engine rankings – which will work to facilitate sales from the site, this seems to be the primary objective of most web sites, as it should be


3. Completing the additional functionality of the web site as desired by the customer – this type of functionality normally falls into the category of “nice to have” rather than “need to have” to facilitate traffic and sales to the site


4. Evaluating and re-evaluating the success of the site and making adjustments to content, sales pitch, and/or product information. This process involves reviewing log files to see how long the customers are spending on the site and how many sales are being made from the site. As target markets are evaluated it may be necessary to alter the proposed target market based on research and sales volume OR it may simply be a matter of expanding the target market and adding specific pages of content geared towards those other demographics of the added target market to facilitate new sales.


5. Maintenance, which is essential to any sites with a back-end database and updated content. Although not a very expensive measure to put into place, not many customers realize the importance of having database integrity verified and backed-up on a consistent basis along with adding new content to keep the site content fresh and updated.

By the way, this little added explanation (in edited form) will become part of one of my sites content pages. Just so you know, as I explain certain procedures in the web development process, I take that explanation and utilize it on my sites to further enhance my site content.

I certainly hope that this provides some useful information and at least a basic explanation of search engine marketing and the attention to detail needed to be successful at obtaining good site rankings.