By Ben Rand
Democrat and Chronicle

(November 29, 2002) — EAST BLOOMFIELD — Type in the words “laptop computer” on the Google search engine and you’ll get back a whopping 1.1 million sites in less than a tenth of a second.

Do the same task on AltaVista, and you’ll get 1.3 million responses. On Lycos: 3.8 million. On AllTheWeb: 697,000.

Needless to say, if your page is number 1 million in those lists -- or even number 250, for that matter -- you’re toast. Prospective customers don’t even know you exist.

It’s then you might want to talk to a local business that views the Web-search process as an important new form of advertising.

InTheTopThirty.com of East Bloomfield, Ontario County, works to move clients to the top of query results on the major search engines such as Google, AltaVista and Lycos.

The company guarantees customers that their sites will be found -- hence, the company’s name -- among the top 30 sites returned during searches on those engines.

The company does this through a cat-and-mouse game in which an expert, using software and her own intuition, tries to figure out the perfect key-word formula that will propel a site to the top.

It’s not as simple as you might think.

A laptop computer company risks getting banned from the search engines if it puts the words “laptop computer” too many times at the top of its pages, said Amy E. Colburn, InTheTopThirty’s resident expert.

The company lets clients choose both the search engines and the types of keywords it wants to emphasize. That means that a particular company will know it will be near the top when prospective clients are hunting for its specific services.

The company is a division of Creative Approaches Inc., also of East Bloomfield, a provider of computer-based training. It was founded two years ago by Travis Piper, president of Creative Approaches.

A top listing can be very lucrative, Piper says. Creative Approaches recently figured out a way to check in at No. 2 on searches for “CD reproduction.”

As a result, the company started getting inquiries from potential clients -- 200 consecutive days’ worth, to be exact.

Ironically, InTheTopThirty is having the most trouble getting itself to the top of the heap in searches for “Web positioning.”

That type of search, apparently, is ultra-competitive.

“It’s maddening,” Piper said. “No matter how hard we work, there’s just so much competition. It’s like losing a race by one-one hundredth of a second.”

The challenge is to find the right balance of both quality and quantity, Colburn said. For instance, the company could find a very crafty key word -- but it results in a client being the only site returned.

That suggests that no one is searching for those particular key words and that the approach needs to be reworked, she said.

Picking key words is not exactly a random process. InTheTopThirty is certified with the major search engines and is allowed to monitor the top searches on each of them.

The top ones are no surprise, Colburn said: Britney Spears, ‘N Sync, CDs and movies are among them.

Keeping track of the top “gives us ideas of what to put there for our clients,” she said.

E-mail address: brand@DemocratandChronicle.com

For more information: www.inthetopthirty.com