Increasing Your Search Engine Results Ranking

When it comes to search engine optimization, the ultimate goal is to maximize your search engine results rankings. Without having a high rank on the search engines, all the rest of your Internet presence is hampered. This is why it's important, essential even, to have a good Web page design.

First of all, every business person wants to outrank their competition. This is the most basic motivation for getting yourself higher on the search engine results. The concept is simple: Get seen first.

Outranking your competition on the search engine results page has benefits beyond merely being the first one seen. If you dominate your competition, you are better able to deflect any negative publicity they can make about you. If their smear campaign is on their site, it would be easy enough to bury it.

If, however, the negative publicity appears on a different website, such as Ripoffreport.com, it may not be enough to be high in the search engine results. What if this is a legitimate complaint from a dissatisfied customer? Immediately burying the site in the search engines wouldn't be the best option. These things have a way of coming back and haunting you.

Aside from reputation management, being high on the search engine results has other benefits. You may want to launch a new product or provide a new service. Naturally, you would want as many people as possible to know about it so you can maximize your sales.

This also works on the general public relations level. Say, for instance, you decide to have a sale, be it a clearance sale, a fire sale, or what have you. Just as you would want everyone to know about a new product launch, you would want any announcements of sales or special events to be high in the search engine rankings.

However, in this highly competitive world of Internet Marketing, it takes much more than a good Web page to compete. Since the advent of Web 2.0, it has gotten only harder to compete in this business. Once upon a time, a single person could just slap up a website and expect to be seen. Now it takes much more to get the coveted search engine rankings.

It actually takes a full staff to keep up with all the work of search engine optimization. The struggle for search engine rankings has spilled out from the individual websites to article databases and blog communities. As it is, even the social blog communities are becoming outdated, as they have become saturated with Internet Marketers.

Further, we have to consider how fickle companies like Google can be in setting their search engine rankings. It's not like they make their criteria public, much less any changes in it.