In all my years of experience on the web, I have found that web engine marketers are very good at guessing and praying that their site will be top ten on the search engines. Seriously though, given then impossibility of knowing what the Googles of the world will do next and the ever-growing competition in all markets of the Internet, the life of a Search Engine Optimization professional has become very hard. Some have resorted to illegal or immoral methods in order to trick the search engines into ranking them high. Although this might work in the short term in the long term it will spell disaster every time. Some of the things that people do is cloaking where In terms of search engine marketing, this is the act of getting a search engine to record content for a URL that is different than what a searcher will ultimately see. It can be done in many technical ways. Several search engines have explicit rules against unapproved cloaking. Those violating these guidelines might find their pages penalized or banned from a search engine's index. Remember that the path to the Dark Side is one of Doom. Darth Sidious is a prime example of that.

While the search engine marketing person can't guarantee you a position, what they can do is to apply years of experience to tell you what has worked in the past, and to help you make it work today. In many ways, search engine optimization is really a matter of editing web pages or whole sites to make them the most search engine friendly they can be. Making sure that a given page has just the right combination of keywords, title, links, and so on, is really at its base simply a matter of making that page the best web page it can possibly be. The page that will rank the best in the search engines is also the page that will make the most sense to the human visitor.

Rather than relying on tricks to try to make the page rank high, it is a matter of just making the page the most focused and on-message that it can be. The bad news is that this doesn't guarantee which position in the search engine rankings that page will occupy on a given day. The good news is that the page will always rank well but even more important than that the visitors that will find your page will be more likely to buy because they will not feel tricked by your tactics but rather impressed with the quality of your sites content.