Websites are always rising and falling in search results. Why? Search engines change their ranking schemes constantly. New sites are added. Existing sites are modified. All this yields constant change in search results. Expect change.

Search engines won't tell people their secrets. No search engine gives people a road map to the top. They keep their ranking strategies a closely guarded secret.

Since search engines keep their ranking strategies secret, people often disagree why sites do well, or don't do well, including experts. For seemingly every site rising or falling, there is an expert working on it. At any one time, only one site is on top. The expert associated with that site thinks they know the answer -- until the results change.

Experts and search engines do agree there are some best practices. There are some obvious things to do and not do.

• Do have unique content that is rich in key words.

• Don't employ obvious tricks like repeating key words over and over.

But even sites doing all these things can do poorly in search results. Inexplicably some sites doing only a few or even none of these things can do well. This is why you'll find that leading search engine consultants do not offer guarantees.

Indeed, here is the first paragraph from a 5 figure search engine consulting contract I signed last year with one of the industry's most well-known and respected firms:

"Consultant agrees to provide combination of services without any guarantee to help Client improve rankings with the following major search engines: Alta Vista, AOL, Ask, Google, Lycos, Amazon/Alexa/A9, MSN, Yahoo ... ."

Want guaranteed search results? It's called pay per click. When each click costs an average of $.50 to $1.00 or more, agents can easily spend hundreds or thousands of dollars monthly. Pay per click has earned Google a market cap of $120 billion.

Realize that because search engines keep their ranking schemes a secret, the amount of myths and snake oil is rampant. For example, many search "experts" will charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars to "adjust meta tags." Did you know some or all search engines generally ignore or pay little attention to meta tags? A meta tag adjustment on a web page amounts to a two minute re-ordering or modification of a list of key words. Know what you are paying for. Get references.

In 1998, my company's websites were dominating the top search engine at that time, Excite. As all search engines do, Excite changed their ranking scheme without notice or explanation, and many of our sites began falling in the results. We made the necessary adjustments, but from that day on we vowed to insulate our clients from ever-changing search results. We worked tirelessly to create a network of partner websites, in addition to substantial investments in pay per click, to send traffic and leads to our clients, regardless of rising and falling search results. Now agents ask for our lead generating network independent of our website: They want to plug our network into their existing website because they want leads regardless of how their site is faring in search engines.

Search expert or not, no sane business makes their livelihood dependent on something they cannot control.