Patience is a Virtue, Especially in Search Engine Optimization

We hear this a lot: "You optimized my web site last week, why haven't my rankings improved?" The customer who has shelled out their hard earned money to have their web site improved for the purpose of better rankings is naturally eager to see tangible results. Unfortunately... this is not an overnight process by any means. Search engine optimization is a constantly evolving technology. As the search engines improve their processes, so does the tactics of optimizing web sites.

Let's look at the process from start to finish. Your site is bland and you hire a search engine optimization firm to improve it. First, the site is usually revamped to enhance its navigation scheme (how easy people can move around the site) as well as other improvements. Then the site must be created and posted to the hosting server. Only now can the search engine spiders (those little programs that crawl around the Internet and catalog web sites) find the new and improved site. It may take a few weeks before the spider comes around to your little corner of the Internet. The search engines then take time to incorporate this information into their indexes. Add to this the fact that your competitors are also trying to improve their sites so THEY will rank high too. This will cause a sort of "dog fight" as you all vie for the first page of results for the same phrase. In the end, it can take a considerable amount of time before your improved search engine rankings materialize. We tell our clients to not expect results for two to three months. Sometimes you may get lucky and start showing better rankings in some of the engines within a week or two, but the closer estimate is a few months. And don't forget that unless you continue to keep your site optimized and ripe with fresh, keyword-rich, targeted content, you can be sure that your competition will pounce on you and those enhanced rankings will just show up as a temporary bump instead of an ongoing success story.

So don't think of it like: your web site is fixed and posted one day and the higher rankings are visible the next day. Patience is indeed a virtue when you are waiting for your search engine optimization dollars to pay off. And keep the process going or those wonderful top spots will slip away in no time.