When I was in 6th grade, track and field was all the rage. I've never been particularly athletic. But it was 1984 and everyone in my class was pretty fascinated with the Olympics that year. As you can imagine the school's annual track meet turned into a mini-Olympics.

So I surveyed the events and the sign-ups for each one. I decided that the long-distance running events held the most promise for glory. The 2 mile, in particular, only had 2 other girls signed up—so I was pretty much guaranteed a "medal". That sounded pretty exciting. Maybe I could go for the gold!

However, watching the other events leading up to the 2-mile, I soon learned that one of the other girls was a seasoned runner. She knew all about pacing, how many minutes she should be able to run a mile in, and all that fancy stuff. At that point, I knew that first place was pretty much done for. I barely knew how many laps around the track I had to run. I ran the race anyway and wound up coming in second—which was just fine by me.

It's not all about winning—a place or a show can be just fine

Whenever I talk to a client about search engine placement, this track meet comes into mind. The client comes to me wanting to be #1 for their chosen search term. But for many small businesses, being ranked first is not truly that important—and depending on the search term, being #1 may hurt their business.

How can being #1 possibly hurt?

I know, saying that being on top can hurt your business sounds pretty unbelievable. But, being in first place has several disadvantages:

1. Getting to first place for desirable keywords takes a lot of work. The world of search engine placement is highly competitive. Most people with a website are trying to get placed in the Search Engines.

With all of this competition, you'll have to do a lot of work on your site to get the search engines' attention. This could include keyword research, changing your headlines, editing your text, submitting your site, getting links coming in to your site, and making sure that your site is content-rich. It takes a fair bit of work just to get listed, and then even more work to get to the top. Aiming for third or fourth place can be easier to achieve, and cuts down the amount of work required to get there.

2. The climb to the top is often slow. Raising your ranking on the search engines isn't an instantaneous process. After you've made your changes, you have to wait for the search engines to stop by and re-rank you.

You probably won't get to the top spot on the first try—so you'll have to go through this process a few times to make headway. The quest to get to the top can take quite a while, and having to work repeatedly on optimizing your site for search engines can take your focus and attention away from your business.

3. Being #1 can bring you more "browsers" instead of qualified prospects. Holding the top spot means that you're most likely to be a visitor's first stop on their search. Instead of having a focused idea of what they're looking for, the people who are coming to your site may only have a vague idea—which means more hand-holding and question-answering for you.

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