Strong search engine position can deliver lots of traffic to your website. Here’s actual data so that you can see the value and payoff of building top placement in Google for your website.

Google has tremendous search traffic looking for terms every minute of every day.They are #1 in market share as the search leader locally, nationally and globally. Google gets a lot of attention and of course businesses are constantly trying to get to be number one in the search results for a variety of keywords.

Let’s talk about search engine position. Our first pointer is simple. Abandon your ego. Lose your desire to be in the top position for every keyword that is tied to your business. You must manage your own expectations or you will lose your drive and enthusiasm. Change your focus to generating traffic. Traffic will flow in if you can create a niche for your business and secure position for keyword strings that have search volume and room for competition.

Define your niche by looking at the keywords you think are best for you. Use Google’s Keyword Tool to research the keywords you think are most attractive. Their suggestion tool will tell you the traffic for the keywords you enter, as well as the traffic for relevant or similar keywords and keyword strings. Actual historical data provided by Google validates the results. It’s important to go after keywords that feature medium to medium high traffic that are still very closely related to your business. We define medium to medium high as keywords that contain about 30 – 50% of the traffic of the most active key phrases in the set. It’s your best chance to get position somewhat quickly and to generate traffic.

You must be on the first three pages of results in Google organic search if you want to drive any clicks to your website. Google and AOLSearch, which uses the Google algorithms, made a mistake and revealed real search engine data to the public back in 2007. Here’s some information you might find very interesting.

• The #1 position on Page 1 of Google will result in about 42% of the traffic for that keyword clicking on your website.
• Positions #2 – #10 on the first page secures diminishing returns from 27% to 3% of traffic driving to the website in that position.
• The first ten positions on Page One will absorb 97% of the potential search traffic for that key phrase.
• PAGES 2 & 3 split up the remaining 3% of traffic for a given keyword across all 20 positions on Pages 2 & 3.
• Beyond Page Three is as good as being invisible.

You see the problem. Page 1 of Google is worth a fortune in terms of potential clicks. If you’re picking medium to medium high volume keywords, however, you can still get some return off of Pages 2 & 3. 3% of 40,000 traffic per month is still a fair amount of targeted traffic that may be ready to buy your products.

Other strategies exist that can deliver high search engine position temporarily. You could try Google Adwords and buy sponsored positions in the right column and beige box above the organic results. Be sure that the pages you link to from Adwords convert and generate income, as each click is going to cost you pennies or dollars. In the long term, your cheapest and most effective source of traffic will derive from building a good organic Google position. You should read our article on Search Engine Algorithms so you understand what you are dealing with, and also should try some of our Hot SEO Tips For 2010. These resources may help you ride along and get quick results temporarily on other websites until you catch up.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg. SEO is a complicated business all by itself. You can see some return on your efforts this year by following some of the pointers we’ve mentioned. Our best advice in succeeding in online network marketing is to find ways to get some success early, so you can keep your enthusiasm high and build upon the results.