A Word of Caution Teacher: Sumantra Roy Search engine placement is by far the best way to generate traffic to your web site. A top rank in just one of the major search engines for one keyword can bring in thousands of new visitors to your site. The best thing about these visitors is that all of them are potential customers for you, since they have searched for the products and services that you sell. However, before you embark on optimizing your site for the search engines, I would like to put in a word of caution. If you decide to do your own search engine placement, there is something that you will need to have on your side - time. Unless you have at least 2-3 hours to spare everyday, you will simply not be able to get your site to the top of the search engines. Why? Well, initially, you will have to conduct research on how each of the search engines work. Once you do that, you will need to create pages which are optimized for the search engines. Once you have created the optimized pages, you will need to submit each of these optimized pages to the search engines. Then, you will have to wait for a few weeks to let the search engines add your site to their databases. After the search engines have added your site, you will need to check the search engine placement of your site in each of the search engines. If you find that your site has not attained the top rankings that you had hoped for, you will have to repeat the whole process all over again. However, even if your site does attain top rankings, your work is not over. Each search engine frequently changes its algorithms which means that a site which has a Top 10 ranking today may not have the same ranking tomorrow. Furthermore, your competitors will also be trying to get their sites to the top. Hence, you will need to constantly monitor the ranking of your site in all the search engines, and you will have to re-optimize those pages that are showing a downward trend in their rankings. Thus, you'll need to spend a minimum of 2-3 hours every day for search engine placement. If you do have 2 or 3 hours to spare every day, then you should, by all means, do it yourself. However, it is quite likely that you find it difficult to take care of all your normal business activities because of a lack of time. Hence, you can hardly afford to spend 2-3 hours every day on search engine placement. In that case, it may make sense for you to hire a specialist search engine placement company, so that you can concentrate on your normal business activities. If you do decide to hire another company, make sure that it offers you a guarantee regarding the number of search engine positions that it can attain for you. I have seen too many search engine placement companies which offer no guarantees whatsoever. About the teacher: Sumantra is one of the most respected and recognized search engine positioning specialists on the Internet. For more articles on search engine placement, subscribe to his 1st Search Ranking Newsletter by sending a blank email to 1stSearchRanking.999.99@optinpro.com or by going to http://www.1stSearchRanking.com