I feel being present in the first page itself is definitely a greater achievement. People will tend to move to second page only when they are not satisfied with the first page result
First page, without a doubt. Technically, even if you are among the first three from the bottom, people will eventually find you, as they'll go to the second page only when they aren't able to find out anything substantial in the first page. But aim for the first three places. Anything after that doesn't stand a great deal of chance, especially if your niche is a highly competitive one.
More opinions? I have a site ranks #1 on yahoo 1st page and #1 on Google 2nd page with hot adult keywords comes with 2,253 daily wordtracker counts. Yahoo brings decent traffic 800+ daily while google doesn't. Maybe 100 daily UV from google atm, will check the difference when the site moves to bottom of google 1st page.
Of course ranking last 3 on 1st page but both get almost nothing. Top 3 or you'll get very few traffic.
for a million dollars they'll drop flyers from a plane on random cities that say = "Secret: the real 1st page on search engines is 1,000,000 page. Dont be fooled by them big fat corporate hoggers. everybody knows that page 1 million is the REAL start page 1 in search engines. - go do it , tell your friends - everybody else is but you, so we felt sorry for you and dropped these flyers to make contact with you , ..that way it wouldnt cause any confrontational embarrassment to you. annonymous ! "
first page is always best, i also think that anywhere in the top 3 is perfect, i have a thought that some people who are regular googlers and get flustrated with it sometimes preffer to ignore the first result and start part the way down first. thats what i do anyway
you are right, as I get results fomr a specific keyword from page 26-28 [ about 20-30 a day ] wich is a big number... the point is that many bypass the first results, so i say #1 place in the 2nd page is better