There is a mad struggle to get to the top of search engines! People are alternatively pulling their hair out, reveling in their success, or staring at their monitor, totally mystified. In the midst of this mad struggle come the "experts", claiming they know exactly what search engines are looking for. But it's not true. They don't know. No one does.

I defy anyone to definitively state exactly what any particular search engine is looking for. I don't mean some general guidelines. I mean exactly.

I already know that no one knows this, other than the software engineers who work for the search engines, and they aren't telling. I've had conversations with these people, and even though my company is a big advertiser on their sites, they still won't tell me. They won't tell anyone. Not advertisers, not the press, not users of their system -- no one.

You see, search engines never, ever tell people exactly what they are looking for when they try to match web sites to searches that their users perform. And to make it even harder, they change what they look for regularly. At any moment, they can change what they are looking for, and any good results you are enjoying will vanish. Believe me, it happens all the time.

Why are they so secretive about what they look for when selecting web sites for searches? They don't want you to be able to influence your results in their system! It compromises their "editorial integrity". Every search engine has software engineers whose sole job is to make sure that the results they show people are of high quality. They don't want you or anyone "hijacking" their search engine using any tricks or inside knowledge.

Knowing this, how does anyone make their pages do well in search engines? It takes countless hours of experimentation, comparisons, testing, and retesting. There's nothing exact about it. It's all really educated guesswork. And in the end, after doing all this work and coming up with a successful strategy, your success can and will be taken away in a heartbeat when the search engines change their selection criteria. You end up having to start all over, again and again. One prominent company in this industry estimates that it takes about 30 hours per week for an individual to keep up with the search engines - for one web site.

Even if the search engines did divulge exactly what they look for, in detail, then everyone would know -- not just you and me. Everyone would quickly make the same changes to their web sites, and before you know it, we'd all be back in the same merry-go-round of search engine frustration, success, and mystification.

Published: June 7, 2000

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Lawrence Schoeffler is Vice President of Dominion Homes Web Services and founder of NUMBER1EXPERT. Dominion Homes Web Services includes Advanced Access, Agent Advantage by Homes.com, and Best Image Marketing, and is a division of Dominion Enterprises. Advanced Access is the industry leader in agent websites. More agents invest in an Advanced Access website than any other. Agent Advantage is the official agent website service of Homes.com, one of the most popular real estate portals in America. NUMBER1EXPERT by Best Image offers America's Top Performing Web Sites, with traffic and leads unequalled in the industry, sold exclusively to Top Selling Agents. Email Lawrence at .