I just did a search for “SEO” on Google. Here is what came back:

2 sponsored listings, which are actually paid advertisements with sales pitches. If you click them, Google gets paid.

#1 most relevant result: a set of links to the financial performance of stock market symbol SEO, a paper manufacturer.

#2 seochat.com, an SEO portal that started as a discussion forum many years ago.

#3 seo-ny.org, a non-profit “Sponsors of Educational Opportunity”

#4 Google’s own page warning you not to hire an SEO firm. They say things like “You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press” and “Ask your SEO firm if it reports every spam abuse that it finds to Google using our spam complaint form…Ethical SEO firms report deceptive sites that violate Google’s spam guidelines.” What a load of garbage.

#5 seotoday.com, an old seo website last updated October 2005 (?). But is has Google’s AdSense ads on it. Go figure.

#6 wikipedia’s article on SEO, which was torn apart by real SEOs as a terribly ignorant report on SEO by people who admitted they had little actual knowledge of SEO.

Now we know people search SEO looking for search engine optimization. So we also know that Google is “managing” this result set, because there is no way it could be “objective” and get this set (actually, we know Google hand manages the SEO queries… it’s been going on for years).

Now here is a tip for you… the next time you need a name for a company that you will want to rank for it’s own name, just call it SEO. There’s no competition.