Can SEO efforts give an overnight result?

Search engines have become important media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the web despite its size and complexity.Search engines are playing an increasingly important role in Internet marketing and commerce. There are increasingly sophisticated technology tools and approaches to utilizing search engines to achieve marketing goals.

Search engine optimization is removing natural defects or shortcomings that is called optimizing a web site. A fully optimized web site is both search engine friendly as well as user friendly. Search engine optimization though a young science has seen tremendous growth in recent years. This growth has been fueled by need for online traffic to a site. Online traffic can come to a web site through many sources in which traffic coming from search engines is a major source. Most of the traffic from search engine would only come to a site if that site comes on the first page of result's page. Here the role of search engine optimizer starts. He tweaks web site by which it can appear prominently in SERP's.

The question arises whether big claims made by lot of SEO firms are valid or are advertising gimmick? Now lots of SEO firms claim with testimonials of achieving top rank in SERPs. For this we have to analyze the following things-

•Is achieving top search engine rank for a competitive keyword possible in one month time?
•Is there a short cut route for search engine optimization?
•Does a site with less content achieve top search engine ranking?
•Is search engines biased?

If answer to the following questions is NO then we can confidently say that all the big claims put forward by SEO firms are fake. There is no substantial evidence to prove that top rank could be achieved in a short period. A site can improve its rank in search engine but it is a slow and natural growth.