(FORTUNE Small Business) – How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. How do you get to the top of search engine listings? More practice than it's worth. I was wary of First Place Software's WebPosition Gold 2 ($149) and its claims that it could get my website in the top ten at major search engines for my keywords--and without the work of doing it manually. We set up a site devoted to "maple nuts," and using the software, submitted it to a few dozen engines. For the weeks of testing, it's been "nuts!" on most maple searches around the web, notably Yahoo and Google. But my site did pop up at No. 10 on MSN, although it later disappeared completely. First Place chalked it up to "that's what search engines do." It took a lot of work just to get my blip, and considering the constant vigilance the program requires, with no guarantee of success, skip it and find a reputable service that can get you better search rankings, instead of doing it yourself. --L.S.