SEO Isn’t an Overnight Process!

Search engine rankings don’t come over night. They don’t even come over week, or month – a well thought out campaign that is intended to boost a competitive site to a number one ranking will take three months, minimum… so don’t let anyone tell you differently. You might luck out and catch a #1 ranking for some long tail phrases in an obscure niche, but to rank your entire site competitively is a gradual process.

There are several factors to consider when looking at your long term expectations for your site. How optimized is your site before you began actively pursuing SEO? If your established site had no optimization in place at all and navigation issues are preventing search engine spiders from crawling, opening the site up is the first step

How many inbound links do you have? If you have an old site with no links you need to get cracking if you want results in the next six months! If you have a number of links already, Google probably will put you on their ’to-do’ list when they receive notification you are updating.

How old is your website? If your site is brand new with no links, Google may not have even seen you yet. If you do nothing, your site may never be indexed – you must get a few links and submit a sitemap if you want to get indexed.

How flexible is your site? If your current back end is very rigid, it will take longer to implement positive change and better your content management system.

How competitive is your target phrase? The more competitive this phrase is, the more links, pages, and fresh content you will need. Picking a target phrase that has a fair amount of searches, but not so much competition is your policy.

Is your site even be able to compete? Look at the top 10 other sites for your target phrases. If they can boast 10,000 inbound links and 1000 plus pages, a beginner site with 7 links and 12 pages is out of the running. If the top 10 includes Amazon, eBay and Wikipedia, do yourself a favor by reevaluating your goals.

For established sites, rankings will come more quickly. If your established site has lots of links but lacks fundamental SEO and proper navigation, correcting these will bring results quickly. Building links, however, significantly increases the wait time.

Whatever the industry and target phrases, you will probably wait a bit for your search results – just how long, is hard to tell. Don’t give up; keep concentrating on SEO efforts and watch the long tail and your traffic to see your site slowly gain momentum!