Whenever possible, do not use flash on your website.

Flash presentation takes long to load and this is especially important if some of your would-be-clients are still using dial-up connections. People coming to your website are looking for information: information that will help them decide whether or not they will avail your products or services. There's no reason to deny them the information, causing their computer to slow down just so that you can present some moving images with marketing-esque phrases.

Some browsers do not have flash players readily installed with them. Moreover, flash player is updated separately from the browser. People who do not have flash players installed in their browsers will not be able to see your flash presentation. People who didn't update their flash players may or may not see the flash presentation depending on its backward compatibility.

Search engines do not see flash presentation. They see it like how they see embedded images. Whatever text you put in the flash presentation, search engines won't be able to see it and associate your website with the words in that text. Recently, Google has developed a way to index flash websites, which is even worse because Google shows lone SWF file in the search results instead of the whole web page on which it is embedded.

The worst offender here are the pure flash websites. That is, all the content of the website are in just one SWF file embedded on the home page. This kind of websites disable a lot of the fundamental functions of the web. For example, in a typical website, clicking on the navigation menu will deliver you to another page within the website. To go back to the previous page, all you need to do is to click on the back button. You cannot do this in pure flash website because when you click on the navigation, you are simply presented another part of the SWF file but you are still in the same web page. Clicking the back button will deliver you to another website, the one that you visited prior to accessing the pure flash website. You also cannot bookmark a specific section of a pure flash website; the only one that you can bookmark is the web page on which the flash is embedded.

Should in case you insist on using flash presentations, I suggest you keep it at minimum. Put stuff in it that are good eye candy but are otherwise non-essential to your website. Meaning, site visitors who cannot see your flash (or intentionally disabled flash in their browsers) can still access your website, find the information that they need, and contact you in case they need your products or services.

The only times when flash presentation is essential is when you need interactive presentations such as demonstrating laws of physics in a science website or in online-games like those that you can find in Facebook. For a typical company website that only needs to show what the company is all about as well as their products or services, flash presentation is not needed.

The advantage of ranking on top of search engines made some website and business owners to expect unrealistic results from search engine optimizers. A number of times, I encountered job postings at Get A Coder and ODesk requiring the bidder/freelancer to put their website on number 1 or else they won't pay. I find it rather silly that some people are actually willing to take this kind of job. These bidders either do not know what they are doing or are using deceptive techniques (a.k.a. blackhat SEO) that would not be good for your website in the long run.

Google said no one can guarantee SERP position

According to Google Webmasters/Site owners Help, "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." Well, that's it! Google themselves said so. I would suggest that you check that page because it contains everything you need to know and to expect before hiring a search engine optimization (SEO) expert, or before trying and learning how to do SEO by yourself.

Search engines continuously modify their systems

The objective of search engines is to provide the best possible results for certain search queries. Here, the word "best" means the best website in terms of its usefulness to humans. While search engines can never perfect their system (and therefore there will be always people out there who can exploit the flaws in the system), they continuously improve the system to the point that whoever attains to rank high by exploiting the flaws would not stay there for too long. Instead of spending time looking for flaws, you should use that time producing the best content for human users.

New websites in particular should not expect to rank high in search results

Websites are like professionals. The longer you are staying in the industry and consistently producing the same high quality (not necessarily the best results), the easier it is for people to trust you. In the same manner, search engines trust older sites that provide quality content rather than new sites. Some possible exceptions are:

• the domain was old in a sense that it was registered several years back, but it was only put into actual use at the same day, week or month as the newer site
• the older website is using search-engine unfriendly technology such as flash
• the older website is very rarely or was never updated
• the newer website contained all the words that are being searched but not the older website, e.g., the user searched for "blue green red widget", the older site contains the words blue, green, violet, orange and widget while the newer site contains blue, greed, red, violet and widget
• the older website was banned by search engines for using black hat SEO techniques

Age factor is one of the few things that webmasters can never influence. They can influence the content, the backlinks, etc but not the age of their website. Some black hat practioners will try to circumvent it by buying an old domain immediately after it expire. However, search engines now treat recently bought expired domains as new domain. Therefore, the age factor of these domains are back to zero. The only realistic way an aspiring website owner or online entrepreneur can capitalize on age factor is to buy an existing website and not drastically change the main topic of its content.

If there's no guarantee, why should I bother paying for search engine optimization?

The only thing that search engine optimizers (or SEO experts) can really guarantee is to make your website search engine friendly. Meaning, he or she can examine the codes and structure of your website and see if there is anything in it that makes it difficult for search engines to crawl your website. Some of the things that a SEO expert can do, or recommend to you or your webmaster:

• appropriate keywords for title tags (should have all important keywords, but it should also be coherent and not look spammy)
• check what keywords web users frequently use that are appropriate for your website by using tools such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• restructure your site from pure flash or frames into pure HTML, CMS-powered (content management system, like blogs and wikis) or any structure wherein the content is visible to search engine spiders
• construct a sitemap for easier crawling and indexing of search engines
• provide initial set of backlinks so that search engine spiders can crawl your website from those links (around 10 backlinks should be enough, having around 500 backlinks in just a week for new websites tells search engines that you are spamming and can get your website banned)

You should avoid SEO experts that claim they can guarantee your ranking in search engine results

As I said earlier, it is either they do not know what they are doing or they are using black hat techniques.

Some new website designers or search engine optimizers tend to promise everything just to get clients, promising Heaven and Earth just to get the job (and the pay). Then, they would start applying some search engine techniques that they know, and if they didn't reach the rank that they want to achieve, will resort to black hat techniques. They may succeed or may not. If they succeed, that rank will not be permanent (unless you update it regurly) because search engines will eventually change algorithm.

If they used black hat techniques (such as overly aggressive backlink generation), say goodbye to your top position because search engines will eventually see the trick and penalize (or worst ban) your website. Some black hat practioners will intentionally use black hat techniques to impress you that they can indeed put your website on top of search results. Then, few days or weeks after you payed them, you top ranking is gone because search engine already saw the trick and penalized you for it.

Another type of SEO Expert claiming that they can guarantee your search result position goes like this. They will type the name of your company in search engine text box. When your website appeared to no. 1, they will claim it as the result of their work. Of course, if no one else use your company name, you can easily top the search results for that name. Another gimmick is to find a rare word or phrase within your content and demonstrate that you top the search results using that word or phrase. The question is: Are these the keywords that your target audience search in search engines?

Conclusion

No search engine optimizers, no matter how good they are, can guarantee your position in search engines. That's a fact. Position in search engines depends on several factors like the age of the website, the content of the website and the actual string of words that the web users use. No SEO expert can control these. Therefore, no one can guarantee a specific search result position. Black hat practitioners might be able to assure your position but search engines will soon notice them and ban your site. The best thing you or your SEO expert can do is to make your website search engine friendly and update it on a regular basis.

In planning for SEO, search engine optimizers (or SEO experts) would normally use tools like Google Keyword and try to incorporate to their site the most frequently searched keywords related to their business. While this step is very important, going after the keyword combinations that are searched more often is not always a good idea. Others would go around posting backlinks on forums and blogs to increase Google pagerank. While this is also a good strategy, it is very labor intensive. Personally, I prefer to use this as a last resort, or if the website that I build really aimed for a high traffic, like a blog intended to earn through pay-per-click or affiliate programs.

Before optimizing the website for search engines (and even before developing the website), the following must be considered first with regards to the business of your client:

• What is the goal of the client? Is it to increase sales? Is it to look for investors?
• Who are the target audience of the website? Are they potential customers? potential investors? Are they located in a specific country? specific city?

These two considerations shall help us narrow down the traffic of the website. Did I say narrow down the traffic? Well yes, we will narrow down the traffic, but the few visitors that the website can get would definitely help to achieve the goals of the client. The idea here is to use the concept of niche marketing in search engine optimization. We want less traffic, but those few visitors are more likely to avail the product, invest in the business, or do whatever it is that the clients are hoping them to do.

The concept of niche market is a well-known strategy in the business world. Small bookstores can attain success by not directly competing with larger bookstores, by selling only certain types of books for certain types of book enthusiasts. The restaurant with the widest selection of food is not necessarily the one with highest income. Hence most restaurants appeal to niche market by specializing with certain types of food (chicken, pasta, steak, etc) and by targeting certain people (students, office employees, etc). With niche marketing, competitors are not really competitors. People can easily find what they really want, and companies can easily find people that can help them achieve their goals.

Here is an example of how we can apply niche-marketing strategy to SEO. A company is selling scented candles on wholesale or bulk order. It is located in the Philippines and while they intend to export in the future, they are not confident with the idea of selling outside the country as of now. The website of that company can be optimized for keywords “wholesale scented candles in the Philippines” or any rearrangement of those words. While keywords like “scented candles” or “wholesale products in the Philippines” will necessarily gain more traffic, they would not necessarily get the people who want to buy scented candles in bulk that are based in the Philippines. If we optimized for just “scented candles”, the client will be competing in SERP with companies that are not really competitors. The client's company will be competing with those companies that sell scented candles per piece, those that provide livelihood programs teaching how make scented candles (but do not sell them), and as well as those who sell scented candles in Canada, in Kazakhstan or in Eritrea. If we optimized for “wholesale products in the Philippines”, we will get people who are thinking of setting-up businesses, but most of them might not want to sell scented candles.

Gaining quality visitors is much better that gaining more visitors. Search engine optimization should not be the goal in itself. Rather, search engine optimization should be planned based on the goals of the client and the target market the client would like to do business with.