You want that #1 Google ranking – and you want it bad. Today, achieving a #1 ranking on Google is the holy grail of business success. But, think about it, if large corporations employ teams of full-time experts simply to fiddle with the optimization faddle of search engines, what chance do you have on your budget?

Well, as it turns out, you have quite a lot – but your real advantage is to put those on stage and online promises to a simple test. Doing this can keep you from hiring the wrong person for your own “optimization fix.”

Here are two quick ways to optimize your own knowledge of this topic, without having to get under the hood and deal with all the technical stuff.

1. Has Your Web Site Optimizer Optimized?

We’ve written about this before in an article called “Be Careful Who You Hire to Optimize Your Web Site.” The strategy we taught in that article is still works just fine. And, the company we mentioned back then, Webolutions, still tests out mighty fine in Google’s results.

For those of you who don’t have the time to read the linked article above, the strategy is to test your web design company’s own optimization results by doing a simple search in Google or Yahoo this way (and it works for any city):

• web design denver
• web site design denver

2. Welcome to Compete.com – Traffic Cop

Here’s another way to test the promises of those who would be your web site optimizers. It’s called Compete.com – and it’s a riot to use. You can test up to 3 companies against each other for free.

So, put the 3 web site optimization companies you’re thinking of hiring to the “Compete test.” You’ll see a very clear graph that compares their own web site traffic. You see, they are saying they can help you drive traffic to your site. Do they drive traffic to their own site? That’s a fair question. If not – you might want to think twice about hiring them.

Then, start punching in other sites and blogs to see who’s getting the most web traffic. Put in your own web site. Wouldn’t it be shocking if your own web site’s traffic was better than the person at the front of the room – or the person romancing you online?

One Thing to Remember about Compete.com

I hate to break it to you, but the brutal truth is that almost no web sites or blogs get much traffic – no matter how well your site is optimized – and no matter how hard you try.

Here’s a little Compete.com test you can do at home. Put in your own web site, a competitor’s site and, oh, let’s say, CNN.com. What you’ll see is a robust zillion visitors to CNN, along with two flat lines. Unless you are Seth Godin, Ebay or Dilbert your blog and web site are not going to get a lot of traffic.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have success with your blog or web site – but it does mean that numbers is not the main game you want to play. That’s the game they’re playing on you. Don’t bite.