how hard is it to increase your ranking in Top Ten?

and how long should it take?

[maxxtraxx]

my boss decided that it would be fun to base my next pay increase on whether i can increase our company's ranking on Yahoo! Web Matches.

so my question to everybody is: is this fair?

our company site is already in the Top 10 (#7 to be exact), so if this is a fair challenge, ( i have approx. 7 months to increase the ranking by at least 3 spots) how difficult do you think this is and how long might it take?

we sell CPE software and our competition consists of about 2 heavy hitters and 5-10 small fries. ( we're pretty small ourselves.)

thanks for any input!

[buckworks]

A more productive benchmark would be basing the pay increase on how much your traffic grows during the same time frame, from the search engines in general.

If you target one word or phrase in one search engine you can't be certain of results no matter how hard or how smart you work, but if you do things right the benefits of your work often spill over to search phrases you didn't even think of. You should get credit for increased traffic from that no matter what happens to the main target term.

[Marcia]

>>our company site is already in the Top 10 (#7 to be exact),

Then you're talking about optimizing for Google, right? If it's #7 with the goal getting it up to #4 it should be easy-peasy. If it happens before the pay raise target date can you get a little bonus as well? ;)

If it's #7 it's already got a good start. Is it doing about the same at Google and other search engines, too? And is it the primary keyword, the homepage?

[2_much]

It really depends on the keyword, you can easily increase for some keywords but others are very hard to track and the rankings are pretty fixed.

Perhaps you can offer them to rank for other keywords?

Then you can choose the keywords, create pages for them, link them to each other, create a "section" home page where you link them all together, link that from the home page, and you're good to go :-)

[DaveN]

basing the pay increase on how much your traffic grows during the same time frame

Never a truer statement said, what happens if you work yourself to death for the next five months, traffic is good and you slowly start to rise in Y!, then Y! switch G off where are you ranking on Inktomi at the moment, go back to your boss and tell him it's not all about being #1 I would rather have 1000's of #5's than just a couple of #1 in the end it's should be about your bosses ROI in YOU, do your job get more traffic.

DaveN

[ogletree]

Very few people really get Internet Marketing. You can have graphs and charts and all kinds of proof that 1000's of fives is better than 5 #1's but some people just don't get it. I told my boss about how great a particuler keyword was and that it gets tons of hits. I took a bunch of our PPC's to number 2 one week and our traffic stayed the same. My boss went though the roof saying we had to be number one. Sometimes it is just frustrating.

[Terrier]

Thank heavens I am my own Boss.
DaveN is right on the money!.

[DaveN]

it's all about Staying Power if you only have one money spot when thats gone it's all gone no staying power.

Build something to last with meaning go for 3 keyword sets 1000's of them, 2 keyword sets 100's of them, the single keyword will come and go when its in it's fantastic, pay day.

But class it has a bonus not a business model

DaveN

[maxxtraxx]

thanks for all the excellent input!

>>If it's #7 it's already got a good start. Is it doing about the same at Google and other search engines, too? And is it the primary keyword, the homepage?

yes, it is the primary keyword and the homepage. it is currently charting at about the same on all the other majors - ( Google:#8 AltaVista:#4 LookSmart:#4 MSN:#2)

and hopefully i will get a bonus if it increases before the target date.

=)

[2_much]

I agree, the key is staying power.

What is staying power?

Always staying awake

Never giving up

Being ready to react

Enjoying what you're doing

Always ready for more

With staying power, it's easy to get the rankings for the target keyword, all the secondary keywords, to recover if you get hit, to maximize success.