Search Engine Optimisation - Thursday, August 14, 2008 13:10 - 2 Comments

How SEO works

I think it is important that people who are new to SEO realise what results they can expect from a good SEO campaign and what would be considered normal throughout a dedicated SEO effort.

Firstly i would like to point out that SEO is a long term strategy. It is not usually responsible to be told or think that more traffic will come to your website quickly, there are other online strategies if that is your goal.

It is generally considered best practice for the on page optimisation to take place on your website at the beginning of an optimisation campaign. The goal with this is to make it clear to Google what it is you want to be found for or what it is you are offering. Depending on if you have a new site, how old your existing site is or the program it has been built by, this will take between a few hours or a few weeks. If your SEO consultant is familiar with your system it will be faster. And if there is a lot of work to be done, like seo copy writing or restructuring from an seo friendly system it will take longer.

But often within the first month or so you should have seen some initial improvement to your rankings. This might not be true if your site already ranks quite highly, or has had some elements to it Google considers unethical. A slight slip in rankings can also be normal in these cases.

When the onpage work has been done the emphasis switches to link building. The more other websites that have an inbound link to yours, the better. Creating these links is an ongoing process for your seo consultant and they should be submitting maybe twenty links a day at least a few days per week.

The majority of sites SEO experts submit links to are not intended to increase your rankings and will often not even be intended to receive much traffic themselves. So don not count on this inbound linking to open up new avenues for clients to find you.

Usually month two is the hardest from an SEO clients point of view. After an initial rise in rankings from the onpage work and a few good links, it is common to get excited and expect contiuous improvements. Sometimes you can be lucky and this will happen but more often than not the second month will not generate big improvements.

The reason for this is that first a link request is submitted. Then it has to be reviewed by the website owner, which can take minutes or months and is beyond your seo persons control. Unless you ant to pay for links which guarantees a quicker approval of your link. So then your link is up and you have to wait for Google to discover that link exists and add it to your websites index. And this has to happen over and over again.

After a month or two the link building 'gains traction' and more consistent ranking improvements will likely follow. Other ways to encourage more links include article submissions, forum and blog marketing and press releases. All of which can be time consuming but a dedicated SEO person will do this, much more likely if you supply articles for them.

If your SEO person is good, you can expect to be pushing the top ten within some months, depending on how competitive your industry is on search engines. The strength of your competition will then be the main factor for how long it takes to get a good traffic generating position at or near the top.

What i think if you are suspicous if your SEO person is busy or not, is to ask them questions. What have they done for your site this week? can they show you anything about where links are being built? What are their plans for the next weeks? Why do they think the rankings are not rising?

Good answers should be provided if they take your result personally and are dedicated to seeing your site rank very well.

Finally, I recommend trying to stay upbeat about what is going on. If your SEO consultant has to build links for you on a daily basis, you want them to have a positive image of you in their mind. If they like you, they will be much more likely to have passion for your project. If you have not met them before and you think they are going stale on your project, why not organise to meet up with them and show them your face. Buy them a coffee, help them understand your business more. I have seen this reignite passion in SEO projects many times before.

Hope that all makes sense and is not to much of a mish mash of ideas.

Troy