2. SEO is undisputedly the best method for generating traffic
and profits. That being said, you need to understand the
inherent conflict that can arise with SEO.
4. SEO is both the technical effort and art of getting your site
ranked highly in search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN.
There are two competing factors in the effort, time and
volume of traffic, which can lead to clients having
unreasonable expectations.
5. The conflict giving rise to misunderstood SEO expectations
deal with keywords. Obviously, an optimization program
is designed to get you high in the rankings on various
keywords. The problem, of course, is the more traffic a
keyword produces, the higher the number of sites
competing for rankings under the phrase. Inevitably, this
translates to a longer period of time required to get top
rankings.
6. Obviously, most clients want to obtain top rankings as
quickly as possible. The best way to do this is identify
those keywords that have decent traffic, but few sites
competing for rankings. In such a campaign, clients see
results relatively quickly, but they have fallen into a trap.
Even if they go into the number one position across the
top three search engines, they have limited the amount of
traffic they can receive. This leads to frustration as
revenues are effectively capped.
7. A proper optimization plan should focus on both short and
long term rankings. When laying out the site, the home
page and other centralized pages should be devoted to
keywords with monstrous amounts of traffic that will
require a lot of time to obtain top rankings on. To
counterbalance this, additional pages should be built
focusing on keywords for which there is less traffic, but for
which high rankings can be acquired relatively quickly.
8. The exact time periods on this approach are entirely
dependent on the subject matter of the site and the
keywords involved. For a brand new site, one can expect
to see rankings on MSN within a month, Yahoo in four to
six months and Google in six to nine months. For an
established site, the figures will be shorter but it is
dependent upon the results of the keyword research in
the specific field.
9. Understanding optimization is the key to having
reasonable SEO expectations. A mix of short and long term
goals is the best method of attack in nearly every
situation.