Last week, I attended an American Marketing Association event in Oklahoma City where an employee from Google was the keynote speaker. Once the presentation on marketing in these economic times was complete, the speaker opened the floor to questions from the Oklahoma marketing crowd. The first question was:

“Everyone wants to know how to get top placement for your keywords in Google.”

It just seems that the word is not getting out: There is no magic bullet or big secret to gaining search engine rankings. The only real way to gain the search engine’s attention is to create a site that shows you offer (better than anyone else) the information a user might want to see. If someone goes to Google or Yahoo and enters your keywords, Google’s goal is to return the best possible result so that that user will keep coming back.

Period. There is the secret.

The best way to do this is to create a website that offers a lot of great information that is organized in a way that both visitors and Google’s search robots (ahhh..the spiders) can find all of that information. If your website is poorly structured, doesn’t offer clean navigation and is pretty light on real information, then your rankings could really be suffering.

If you start calling around to SEO companies, be warned that there are many unscrupulous companies in the industry and you can typically spend anywhere from $500 to $5000 and up per month on SEO services…but if they do not start by reviewing the content and layout on your website, they are not working for the long-term good of the client and the campaign will ultimately fail. I’ve been doing this for years now and seen people spend tens of thousands and see little to no success from their money.

So to answer your question from the OKC marketing event: there are no tricks to gaining success on Google or Yahoo and there is no amount of money that a company could pay for natural rankings. You simply build your site the right way and create a plan to continue to grow the site in order to gain search engine traction – for the long term.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments – I would definitely be happy to discuss these secrets at any time.