I tried an interesting experiment with Google recently. After playing around with the design of the Peugeot's weird-faced sports car, the RCZ, I put the image up on a dedicated web page and submitted it to the Google indexer.

I did a Google search for the page each day, using the exact parameters stipulated in the code (ie: Peugeot RCZ 2013). The code was as clean as I could get it, so that those search terms were super-obvious.

Remarkably, it took exactly 26 days for any trace of the page to appear in the search results. More oddly, it took 29 days until the image appeared in Google's image-only search list.

But the thing that really piqued my interest was that mixing up the search terms (eg: "2013 RCZ Peugeot") didn't get any results at all. Huh?

It's known that search engines tweak the way they index and search all the time, mainly to subvert any tricks that might influence results. But I was a little taken aback by the importance of the order of the key terms, along with the time it takes to get a listing placed (even when it's manually submitted).

Goes to prove: search engine optimisation is just as tricky as it always was. If a company offers to get your site on the first page of Google, ask them in detail how they're going to do it, and don't pay them until you actually see it on there!