It takes time, it takes loads of hard work, it takes plenty of rumination, and above all, it takes patience (and a lot of that). Are you just starting at this wonderful field? Already feeling excited after looking at so many opportunities lying around? Having dreams of overnight riches …? Hold on; before you start on your endeavor all keyed up, let me put across a word of caution.
Sonny! … It’s going to be tough.
First thing first, be Patient:
Yes, online business or internet marketing proved to be a source of “easy money” in the past, in fact it proved to be “crazy money” for some, but with the passage of time, as more and more entrepreneurs step into the arena and the competition build up, the road to online success has become relatively lengthy and reasonably taxing. Now, it normally takes months and months of hard work before the lady-luck smiles down on you (in online business lady-luck is known as Google).
Read that last paragraph again; in fact keep reading until it settles down in your subconscious. I’m not emphasizing on this point to discourage anybody, but I see so many people acting like a cat on a hot tin roof as soon as they launch their website. This type of excitement ultimately leads to disappointment. There are exceptions, even I’ve some personal experiences of making it to the first page of Google quite speedily but gradually it’s becoming atypical for a website to get there in short time.
Go all-out:
When I say be patient, I don’t want you to get the wrong picture, so let me elucidate. Patience is not sluggishness, it’s not slothfulness, it’s definitely not about being lazy. Unfortunately, we misinterpret patience as doing nothing and waiting for some miracles to happen. In reality, Patience is working hard, giving your best shot and more importantly, keep giving your best shot until you get there. This simple, yet very effective prescription is all you need to flourish; key to the wonderful door of success, road to the victory or whatever delightful name you’d like to give.
Chew over your plan time and again:
Long-term planning doesn’t really go well with Search engine optimization, even worse is when you make plans, put down a strategy and then carry on and on without paying attention on what’s going into the world of search engines or search engine optimization. You need to revise, modify or adjust your strategy quite regularly. Internet marketing is a lot more dynamic and changing than offline marketing, on surface it looks quite easy, in actual fact it is extremely laborious, even if it involves more mental work than physical.
I’d disagree with the last point (not completely but still).
If you understand the fundamentals of how search engines work and the directions they’re headed in, if you understand how search is evolving, how searchers behave and if you understand, in essence, what Google wants, then your strategy will more or less stay the same over a long period of time.
However, it will change in the sense that as you grow from a new site to an established and then to a #1 ranked site, your execution of your strategy since you’ll find yourself focused more on maintaining those rankings than getting to the top and fine-tuning your seo ‘systems’ so that your new content finds it easier to rank at the top.
What definitely changes is the tools you use to execute your strategies. Blogging (mass acceptance, that is) was a game changer. So was social bookmarking and social media in general.
See, you are defying your own line of reasoning when you say that “search is evolving”, truth is that Google makes changes in its algorithms more often than we think of, you just can’t carry on with the same line of attack, objectives stay the same, not the strategy. For example, “keyword stuffing” was once considered a part of your plan, not now. Same goes for Meta tags, etc.
Let me start by saying that I loved the article.
Ahmed make a point that in the long run the same basic strategies have worked and will continue to work, but at the same time I agree with you that SEO is about research and understanding the latest algo changes and the latest trends. Some time ago twitter for example didn’t make any sense to the industry and it is now a must, bookmarking in 2007/2008 was and still is a great link technique which didn’t exist before. So yes the basics of on site and link building will remain the same the difference is that today H1 tags might be important, in a couple of months they might not worth anything, links from directories were great a couple of years ago as link exchange, now most of the links exchanged aren’t even taken into consideration or might even get you banned.
Good article! I’ve had so many friends who see me after 12 years of Internet marketing and think they can just toss a website up and sit back waiting for the cash.
It is slow going now. Sometimes I have more success with a certain website project than other times. But for the most part, SEO for me is lots of late nights and long days. If you’re not build for little return up front and building for the long term, you’re probably not cut out to do SEO.
Thanks for the article.
I liked the whole post.. once again you did a nice piece of work. i must say that SEO world is changing little by little… some basics techniques are still same but new ones are also approaching gradually.. so we should be more conscious and prepare to adopt the new techs. we can’t leave some of the old techniques despite of this fact that search engines are evolving new algos and strategies..
I total welcome the ideas you pointed out here about SEO campaign. It really takes time and enormous effort to actually get over to the top in SEO world. Notwithstanding, we’ve got to keep on keeping on in order success online in general.
First I need to say this article will made fear those who are fresher in SEO. Agree the point “its takes times”, But with the basic of seo works we can get the more back links and traffic for our page. Since i am a Jr SEO Analyst i have learns the link building process with in a week. So step by step it’s a easy work only. My Team leader Abdul Malick has Guided me when i was a fresher in SEO.
That was brilliant … m glad i stumbled upon this article … that’s a good reminder for even veterans like us … keep it up Chris … and i’ve noticed last post was made well over a month ago … hope that’s a temporary pause … please keep writing … Cheers.
Very well put … our manager asked us (juniors) to read this piece and it was indeed informative.
Well sed I must say Seo is a big challenge, in todays competitive world one must understand basic in and out fundas of seo before jumping into this field it really require’s lots of hard word and most importantly patience..I belive if you are doing every thing ethically you are bound to get rewards before you expect them to happen..
I agree with you and many other seo professional see in the same way as explained above. There is no doubt.
I have been competing in the seo arena couple of years back and not yet been able to earn as I am thinking of. And yes, it needs lots of patience and even harder effort.