There's a lack of understanding by many website owners of the time involved to
fully search engine optimize (SEO) a website and when it can be expected to
start showing positive, organic (non pay-per-click or PPC) search results.
While the time involved to actually optimize a website depends on a number of
factors including the size of the site, whether the site is new or already
established and the speed and knowledge of the individuals doing it; the payoff
time to begin seeing positive organic search results often surprises and
sometimes dismays them.
No Instant Noodles
Once fully optimized, it can take a new site between six and nine months to
finally see positive, organic search results. Previously existing sites may see
significant improvements in as little as three months. No instant noodles
here.
Why so long? It comes down to competition. According to a January, 2006
survey by Netcraft, there are over
75,000,000 websites world-wide competing for the attention of search engines.
While a site is waiting in queue along with thousands of other websites to be
indexed for the first time, search engines are busy crawling and re-crawling the
other 75 million plus sites that have already been indexed.
Worth the Wait
Clearly, organic SEO isn’t an overnight process. That’s definitely not to say it
isn’t a process worth pursuing. Not only is organic SEO a low-cost method of
promoting a website, it’s also much more effective in generating steady,
long-term website traffic when compared to PPC.
The following data demonstrates the overall bias among Internet users toward
free organic search results over PPC:
Another plus to an organic approach is that once a site is optimized, the
largest part (but not all) of the work is done. Keywords and text will have to
be tweaked here and there, search ranking monitored, linking strategies
continued and reviewing website stats ongoing. All said, however, unless
the site is completely redesigned, everything is pretty much in place.
Page Optimization Overview
As I noted in a previous article, “Search
Engine Optimizing Your Website Pages”, optimizing individual
web pages for organic SEO involves a number of things. While the time required
to complete these vary from website to website, the elements involved do not.
The basic elements are:
- Develop Your Key Phrases
- Write Page Content
- Write Page Titles
- Write Meta Tags including description
- Write Alt and Title Tags
It’s critical to ensure that the firm responsible for optimizing your website
understands and incorporates these core page elements into your site’s
optimization process.
Website Links
Another important factor in obtaining high, organic search engine results is the
number of relevant inbound links. If for example, you’re an Alaska tourism
related business, you would very much want to concentrate first on establishing
inbound links to your website from other sites related to travel or tourism.
This is a simplistic example but hopefully you get my point.
“More
Website Visitors Through Inbound Links” details some
techniques for fostering inbound links. The nuts and bolts revolve around
member-based organizations, searches of linking sites related to your industry
and competitive search engine analysis of other industry-related businesses to
your own (who links to your competition).
Sitemaps – Helping the Hand that Feeds You
Within the last six months, Google and Yahoo have both implemented the novel
concept of Sitemaps. Google and Yahoo Sitemaps are intended to more quickly and
efficiently index websites. The concept is brilliantly simple.
Before the advent of Sitemaps, a website URL would be submitted to both search
engines. Google and Yahoo would then add it to their database to index.
Once the URL in question made it to the top of the queue, Google and Yahoo would
begin following internal site links between pages, starting with the homepage,
until they discovered and crawled all pages on the site. This is very time
consuming and enormously resource intensive (remember those other 75 million
plus websites).
Sitemaps do away with forcing Google and Yahoo to follow internal site links to
discover all pages. Instead of Google and Yahoo having to discover pages, you
tell them up front what pages exist on your site, how often each page’s content
is expected to change and the relative importance of each page compared to
others on your site. All this speeds up the process by doing away with much of
the work Google and Yahoo previously had to do.
In effect, your supplying a Sitemap of your website helps the hand that feeds
you. See “Improve
Your Search Odds with Google Sitemaps” and “Yahoo
Sitemaps - An Answer to Google” for a more in-depth look at
Sitemaps.
The Bottom Line
Free, organic website SEO is a process, not an event. Done right, expect to see
positive results in six to nine months for a new website but as little as three
months for an existing site. No instant noodles.
However, given the overall preference by Internet users to organic over PPC
search results, this wait is well worth it and will result in long-term website
search success.
More Alaskan Experts >>
Organic
SEO - No Instant Noodles