I frequently come across SEO service providers who specifically offer “guaranteed top ranking on Google SERPs” to their clients. This sort of guarantee gets a thinking mind to wonder if it’s possible for a non-Google employee to reverse-engineer its search ranking algorithm, in order to bring a lowly-ranked web page to the top. The truth is while you can do some search engine optimization for a site, you can’t surely guarantee Google’s top ten ranking for a competitive keyword, because so many other webmasters in your niche are relentlessly optimizing their sites for the same targeted keyword. That’s assuming the keyword has a high search volume.

Reasons why non-Google employee without access to the search software cannot guarantee top 10 ranking on its SERPs:

• The search ranking algorithm is fully automated.
• SEO providers are outsiders and don’t have the means to reverse-engineer the ranking algorithm.
• It’s apparent that your competitors (other webmasters and site owners in your niche) are also working to get their websites to the top. And the ones already at the top continue to optimize their sites to remain there.

Some SEO service providers I talked to said the reason why they call the service “guaranteed top 10 SERP ranking” is to attract clients. They complain that their clients generally don’t want to hear “I’ll try” – they literally want guarantees that their websites would be among the first 10 listings on Google search results for their chosen keywords. So, as you can see, clients are also a part of the problem.

But can we call this a form of deception? Well, it depends on how you look at it. An SEO specialist who has brought numerous websites to Google’s first page for competitive keywords can defend his/her use of the term. Still, things can go wrong – they might not turn out the way you want them to. And when that happens, the client can rightly say this is a deception. It’s even worse for an SEO amateur to use that term “guaranteed top 10 ranking on Google SERPs”, because there’s likelihood things won’t work out the way it’s anticipated.

The fact is that serious clients who understand how search engines work don’t demand SEO service providers to guarantee top ranking before hiring them. They go to those specialists who have built strong reputations in the field and have easily-verifiable number of websites they’ve ranked in the past.

Search engine optimization is defined as the process of improving the ranking of a website or web page in search engines via organic search results. This process includes on-page, as well as off-page techniques. Before you can become a search engine optimizer, you need to understand how search engines are programmed to function and the keywords Internet searchers type into search inputs. As a site owner, you should learn at least some basic SEO skills, if you have plenty of time to spend learning and implementing the techniques.

On-page SEO
a) Prioritizing keywords through HTML coding: For a site or web page to rank for any keyword, it must contain the term in its content. Include in the title <title> of every web page the keywords or key phrases it targets. This will help the page to rank well for the key terms, if it has quality backlinks that use the same keywords as anchor texts. Bear in mind that any keyword you use in your title should be present in the body of the web page. Make proper use of heading tags, such as h1, h2 and h3, to show search engine crawlers the important keywords on every page. Bing especially assigns higher priority to keywords contained inside these heading tags.

b) Creating unique and keyword-rich content: Create 100% original content for each web page and after that use Copyscape to check if it has any duplicate issue. Duplicate content attracts some kind of penalty from search engines. Ensure that each web page contains all the important keywords related to it. Nevertheless, never stuff keywords into any web page, to avoid triggering Google’s spam filter.

c) Canonicalization issue: Canonicalization issue occurs when multiple URLs can be used to access a single web page. This causes a colossal challenge to search engine bots in determining the canonical URL the webmaster wants them to index. This issue can be corrected by using 301 to redirect other URL variations to your preferred one.

Off-page SEO
In theory, off-page search engine optimization mainly deals with the process of promoting a website or web page to attract incoming links. But it goes well beyond that! Relevance of a backlink to the linked content is what actually makes a difference. Quality of the page where the link originates counts so much. High quality backlinks carry much more weight in the “eyes” of search engines than poor quality ones.