“So Mr. Taylor, how can we help our customer reach #1 on all the search engines?”   Questions like this seem to arise a couple times a year when a customer of the company I work for notices that his or her site is hard to find in the major search engines.   The average person thinks there is some magic pill that will get their site to #1 and keep it there without actually spending time or money on their site.  WRONG.

I learned many years ago by an ex-Yahoo! Asia employee that the best way to reach #1 in the search engines is simple: Create quality content.   Don’t create ‘door-way pages’, don’t liter your pages with keywords, don’t spend time using META tags that don’t accurately reflect what your site actually contains… the search engines will know better (if not today, they will tomorrow.)

Rather than ramble-on, I found this excellent post on James Archer’s blog describing exactly what I’ve been trying to tell people for years:

Ethical Search Engine Optimization

So stop spending your time, money, and effort on applications like Web Position Gold and focus on quality content!