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Search Engine Optimization – Good Things Take Time

Posted on 13. Oct, 2009 by Mlacak in SEO

There’s an ad (com­mer­cial) on tele­vi­sion in New Zealand for a pop­u­lar brand of aged cheese (it’s aged for a min­i­mum of 12 months before it’s offered for sale).

It goes some­thing along the lines of this – and bear with me here – this is more impor­tant to search engine opti­miza­tion than it might first appear…

Two old guys, I would guess who are in their 80’s, have been mak­ing cheese for a while.

Part of that process of mak­ing high qual­ity cheese is the aging process.

So it shows them won­der­ing together at a tur­tles pace through the beau­ti­ful New Zealand coun­try side, jok­ing about stuff, and head­ing down to a river to do a spot of fishing.

The impli­ca­tion here is that they are actu­ally work­ing on the qual­ity of the cheese by let­ting it “age” whilst they’re “tak­ing it easy” and the tag line of the prod­uct is…

“Good Things Take Time”.

This got me think­ing that noth­ing could be closer to the truth when it comes to search engine optimization.

Hav­ing been doing SEO for clients (and our own projects) circa 1999, one thing that is always bla­tantly obvi­ous, even to this day, is that most peo­ple have totally unre­al­is­tic expectations.

They expect that by gain­ing 100 (or 1,000 or even 10,000) incom­ing links to their web­sites (as an exam­ple), that they’re going to shoot right to the top of the search engine rank­ings within a mat­ter of weeks.

They’ll try one seo tech­nique whether that be a spe­cific ser­vice, pro­gram, method, etc and when they don’t see results, will move on to the next and con­tinue on in this fash­ion think­ing it’s impos­si­ble to become well estab­lished in the search engines.

Worst still, in most cases they’re likely to blame what­ever ser­vice / pro­gram / method / tech­nique they’ve tried as being inef­fec­tive, when in fact, they just don’t real­ize that when it comes to search engine opti­miza­tion “Good Things Take Time”.

It’s funny because as part of our search engine opti­miza­tion ser­vices, we offer a num­ber of text link build­ing / adver­tis­ing services.

We ALWAYS make it bla­tantly clear from the out­set that as a new client they’re going to want to keep the cam­paign run­ning for AT LEAST 3 months before the true impact of that total cam­paign is reflected in search engine rank­ing improvements.

Sure rank­ing improve­ments hap­pen along the way, but the “total impact” will not be reflected for quite some time.

Yet, no mat­ter how clear we make this, there are still clients that jump in and then can­cel their con­tracts 2 – 4 weeks after begin­ning because they can’t see any­thing major happening.

Above I men­tioned that’s funny – we it’s not really, it’s actu­ally pretty sad for them. They end up wast­ing their money and time due to their unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions (no mat­ter how clear we get that point across in the first place). I guess there will always be a few.

Back in the day – and I’m talk­ing 1999 – 2001 now – search engine opti­miza­tion improve­ments did used to hap­pen quite quickly.

This was before there was such a major impor­tance put on the fac­tor of incom­ing link pop­u­lar­ity. Ulti­mately with a few “on web­site” opti­miza­tion tweaks you only had to wait until the search engine next updated it’s index before you could mea­sure the result of those tweaks. How­ever the impor­tance placed on incom­ing link pop­u­lar­ity changed that game forever.

Now the search engines (and Google more than the oth­ers) have devel­oped their incom­ing link pop­u­lar­ity weight­ing fac­tors to include such things as “the value of a link”, and “the age of a link”.

In respect to the lat­ter, that means that as an incom­ing link is cre­ated – the older it is and the length of time it remains where it’s first found – the more value it gains – and the more impact it will have on pos­i­tive rank­ing improvements.

So where as we only had to wait until the search engine index was updated to mea­sure results, now we have to wait for…

The search engine to find the incom­ing links in the first place (which can take time depend­ing on the qual­ity of the links).
The search engine to “revalue” those incom­ing links when it finds them again in the same spot on the same web­site.
All other search engine opti­miza­tion rank­ing fac­tors to be taken into con­sid­er­a­tion.
The search engine index to update.
The cycle con­tin­ues…
This whole process can take sev­eral months and it’s why we gen­er­ally advise clients on the 3 month rule to ensure they are see­ing a true reflec­tion of their “total cam­paign” in the search engine results.

SIDE NOTE: I don’t want to get into the specifics too much but it’s largely related to the fact that an incom­ing link from a page with low Google Page Rank takes longer to be found (and by asso­ci­a­tion longer to “age” and gain more value) than a link from a page with high Google Page Rank. Com­pounded by the fact that in most link­ing cam­paigns you’re obtain­ing links from a vari­ety of web­sites with vary­ing Page Rank val­ues, and as a result when look­ing at the cam­paign as a whole… well… Good Things Take Time.

I myself, even to this day and hav­ing been in the indus­try for such a long time, still get impa­tient. It sucks the big Kumara I know, but there’s noth­ing we can do about it…

BTW: “Sucks The Big Kumara” is a say­ing we have here in New Zealand. The Kumara is a sweet potato found through­out the South Pacific. Don’t ask me where that say­ing comes from but it basi­cally means “that’s dumb”. Kiwi’s – go fig­ure mate.

I guess the impor­tant thing to take away from this whole story is to remem­ber that good things take time and to make sure your expec­ta­tions are in check with the tech­niques you employ to improve your web­sites search engine optimization.

You can’t expect to write a few arti­cles for a week, syn­di­cate them around the inter­net and have amaz­ing results.

If you haven’t truly let things “age” when it comes to try­ing other link build­ing tech­niques and meth­ods – no mat­ter what they are – then you need to real­ize that more often than not the fault in poor results lies with being impa­tient, not the tech­nique. Sure some tech­niques are more effec­tive than oth­ers, but even the less effec­tive tech­niques will even­tu­ally work if you scale them up and remain committed.

That last point is also extremely important.

Unlike the two old blokes in the tele­vi­sion ad men­tioned at the start of this story, who you’ll remem­ber went off fish­ing whilst they waited for the cheese to age, you DO NOT want to be doing that.

Sure it’s fine to step back from things for a while (and who doesn’t like a spot of fish­ing to clear the mind), but when it comes to search engine opti­miza­tion you want to be con­tin­u­ingly build­ing incom­ing links to your website.

If you’re not then you can be sure that your com­peti­tors are and that’s why they’re always out­rank­ing you. You need to cre­ate sev­eral arti­cles each week and syn­di­cate them – and you need to do it week after week after week – it shouldn’t stop (out­source it if you need to or just want to free up some time).

You want to employ every effec­tive link build­ing tech­nique in the book and con­tin­u­ally work at it.

But always remem­ber to keep your expec­ta­tions in check.

Remem­ber that what you do today to gen­er­ate an incom­ing link – the true impact that will have in the search engines is going to take sev­eral months – and if you sit and wait, and the result is not good, you’re shoot­ing your­self in the foot by wast­ing time and will for­ever be chas­ing the elu­sive top search engine rankings.

Above all else, if you ever find your­self get­ting impa­tient, say to your­self qui­etly – Good Things Take Time – and then get back to work, the results will come.

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Tags: aged-cheese, months-before