I think it is possible if you do everything right, such as meta tags, inline text with keywords, h tags, bold, articles with incoming links, but the absolute best thing, is press releases and getting your site linked to by high profile sites.... for instance, this is my own experience how I just jumped from who knows where to #11 on google out of competition of over 216 Million sites!

it was for my music site monkfunk.com - my goal was to get up on there for 'online music community' - it was nowhere to be found for years, until, I relaunched the site with tons of new content, admin blog on the homepage(frequently updated) and got a link from the biggest chicago rock radio station to my site. All the sudden it jumped up like crazy... wanna know the funny thing? I don't even have my title or meta tags seo'd at all!!!!! hahaha! think about it! once I do a little bit of seo magic, I will be on page 1 - for my clients, I have also done quite well on google. you just have to drink some jack and coke and start looking at cached pages of google, learn how it thinks and do what it likes.... simple as that!

Whilst getting positioning on terms is always satisfying, you should always keep in mind what the means behind optimising is. For many people the purpose behind optimising a site isnt results its ROI, and thus whilst visibility comes into the equation, the focus is very much on targeting terms which are going to drive the "right customers" in the right mindset to a website, ie those customers that are likely to "convert".

For example, if you type e gain into Google, we come up second out of 115,000,000 results, however I can tell you from experience we have had one visitor looking using htat term, however terms such as SEO UK and other more applicable terms drive far more convertable traffic to our site.

of course the purpose is ROI, but this is keyword that I placed for is the exact term that people search for to find my site 'online music community' , which results in more traffic, free signups, and converted upgraded members...

its not like I placed #1 for potato launcher and my site is for music :eek:

ZING

right on. i am putting up a site that google found already somehow. it's ranking great and i only have one "hello is this thing on" post on the home page blog. sure it's a dead market that i'm trying to blow up, but still.