• What exactly does 1^st Place Listing do?
• Why only Top-20? Don't you offer a Top-10 program?
• Do you maintain my rankings once they're achieved?
• Why do I need to hire a company to do this? Couldn't I do the same thing myself using WebPosition Gold?
• I've seen other companies on the Internet offering similar services. What does 1^st Place Listing offer that the others don't?
• Why do you only support sixteen search engines? I've seen other companies advertising that they'll submit my site to 1,500 search engines for only $79.
• What happens if I decide that I don't want to do business with 1^st Place Listing anymore. Do I lose all my search engine positions?
• Can I talk to some of your existing clients to find out what kind of results you've gotten for them?
• Will you help me select the best keyword phrases to promote my site?
• Can you target specific search engines?
• How do I get started and how long does this whole process take?

Results

• What kind of traffic can I expect to receive on my web site as a result of hiring 1^st Place Listing?
• I notice that you list Yahoo! as one of the search engines you handle. Does this mean you'll get my site listed in Yahoo!?
• What if I already have my site listed in some of the major search engines? Will your listings overwrite my existing listings?

While it's true that we only guarantee Top-20 positions, we often achieve Top-10 positions for our clients. The reason we don't guarantee Top-10 positions is that neither we, nor any other search engine placement company has that degree of control over the search engines. Our techniques aren't magic, they're based upon mathematical algorithms and probabilities. We know that we can almost always succeed at getting Top-20 positions, and while we often do better than that, it's not something that we'd be willing to guarantee.

We know of no other legitimate search engine placement company that will guarantee Top-10 positions and we believe that it would be irresponsible of us or any other company to offer such a guarantee. Some of our competitors may appear to offer Top-10 placement programs, but all they're really doing is charging you extra if they happen to get you a Top-10 position. They charge one price for each Top-30 position they achieve, a higher price for each Top-20 position and an even higher price for each Top-10 position. We think this is a bit unethical since they're not doing any additional work to earn the higher prices.

We charge you the same amount, regardless of whether you end up in the Top-20 or the Top-10. Also, keep in mind that our placement programs range from one to five hundred keyword phrases. So some of your phrases may end up in the Top-20, some may end up in the Top-10, and some may not be listed at all. Our guarantee is for a specific quantity of Top-20 placements. The guarantee doesn't specify which of your keyword phrases will end up in the Top-20, only that we will achieve at least the guaranteed number of Top-20 placements in the major search engines.

• Search engine placement is a very time consuming process. Plan on spending at least 20 hours learning how to use the software, and then at least another 20 hours building your first set of doorway pages. Depending upon how many keyphrases you need, it may take a lot longer than 20 hours to generate all the pages. The software will not generate the pages automatically. It will help you every step of the way, but it still requires a lot of manual input. After you finally complete all your doorway pages, your work has really just begun. Next, you have to submit the pages to the search engines and then monitor the results closely, sometimes day-by-day. Depending upon the results, you may need to go back and redo many of your pages. Once you've finally gotten some good positions in the search engines, you'll need to track those positions continuously and constantly battle with your competitors to stay on top of the search engines.
  
  
• WebPosition Gold is an excellent product, but is still just a tool. In the hands of an expert, it will produce much better results than in the hands of a beginner.
  
  
• If you do your own search engine placements, you will have to spend a lot of time submitting doorway pages and resubmitting doorway pages. This is valuable time that you could focus on running your business and let us handle your search engine positions for you.

Our research has shown that 90% of all Internet search traffic comes from the nine largest search engines. The rest of the search engines generate such a small amount of traffic that they're generally not even worth bothering with. In fact, many of them are nothing but a scam. When you submit your site to them, they require you to also give them your email address. Then they add your address to their SPAM lists and pretty soon you're getting tons of junk email, but no web traffic. We only deal with the largest name brand search engines that have the potential to generate huge amounts of traffic for your site.

The companies that submit your site to 1,500 search engines for $79 are using off-the-shelf automatic submission software. You could buy the same software in any computer store (usually for less than $79) and do these submissions yourself. This type of software, however, is completely ineffective at improving your rankings in the search engines. So, whether you hire one of these companies, or you buy the software and do it yourself, it's a waste of time and money either way.

In general the answer is NO, our system is designed to submit to sixteen major search engines. A Top-20 listing in any one of these engines will undoubtedly generate a significant amount of traffic, so you really shouldn't be too concerned about which search engines you actually end up in initially. With our full maintenance program, we will continue to work on your behalf to get you listed in as many search engines as possible.

If you need a specific search engine targeted we can handle that on a case by case basis.

We usually need a two to three week lead time before we can begin work on a new account. In order to secure a place in our schedule, you must submit an order and we must receive payment. The placement fee is due when you place your order and your first quarterly maintenance payment is due several weeks later, when we complete the initial round of submissions to the search engines. If you prefer, you may simply include the first quarterly maintenance payment along with your placement fee when you submit your order. Once the first round of submissions are complete, we will carefully monitor the results for the next 90-days and we will continue to tweak the doorway pages to achieve the highest possible rankings and to at least meet our guaranteed number of placements. Most of the major search engines are extremely overloaded with new submissions and are therefore taking several months to list new sites. There isn't anything we can do to accelerate the process, so you need to be patient.

It's impossible for us to predict a specific amount of traffic as every site is different. For example, if your site offers products that have mass consumer appeal, it's likely that the keyword phrases you choose to promote will be much more popular than a site that has a more limited niche. We can say that in almost every case, our clients see a dramatic increase in traffic and sales as a result of their search engine placements. We have many clients who after hiring us began generating hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in business from the search engines.

Yes and no. Yahoo! is first and foremost a directory of web sites, edited by human editors. Our standard placement strategies can not be used in this type of situation. However, because Yahoo! is so selective about which sites make it into their directory, they've contracted with Inktomi to provide additional search results. While these Inktomi results are technically not part of Yahoo! itself, they do appear when you search Yahoo! and our placement strategies are very effective with Inktomi. So, with our standard placement service, we will get you into the Yahoo! search engine results, but not the main Yahoo! directory. We do offer a separate service specifically for the main Yahoo! directory. Please contact us if you're interested in learning more about this.