» With Search Engine Optimization, Patience Really Is A Virtue Search Engine Optimization Journal

With Search Engine Optimization, Patience Really Is A Virtue

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 9 of April , 2008 at 6:17 am

You have done everything right according to the search engine optimization guidelines and yet your site is still not appearing when you do a keyword search. Rest easy and have a little patience.

Search engine optimization is not a sprint. It is a long distance race with many tight corners and frequent pit stops; a race where patience and persistence is required to win the gold. Search engines, particularly Yahoo!, can take quite a while to rate your site. Google can be quicker but, in a strange quirk, new sites and new pages can often get a front page listing for several hours before disappearing of the radar altogether.

You have to remember what the search engines are looking for when they rank pages. Incoming links are important along with keywords, content, how that content links internally and areas such as Meta Tags. If your search engine optimization techniques have addressed these areas then it is going to take time for the search engines to filter all that information.

Link building is an important component of search engine optimization and these incoming links are good example. As search engines spider the web they come across pages that link to your pages. The search engine files this information away and continues on its journey. It finds more links and with each link, your pages place in the big picture is re-assessed - however, so are all the other pages throughout the web. It is a constant balancing game with each page being weighted against other pages and it all takes time.

This weighting is extremely complex and is not done so much on a per page basis but on a keyword basis. You can and will rank higher for one keyword when compared to another.

This is an extremely brief view of a very complex process. The bottom line is, when it comes search engine optimization outcomes, not only is patience a virtue, the job is never finished. You need patience to wait for the outcomes - persistence to keep and then improve your SERP position - after all - everyone else is on the same highway looking for the same Search Engine Optimization results.

Category: SEO

1 Comment

Comment by morgan

Made Wednesday, 9 of April , 2008 at 2:05 pm

This is exactly what I tell clients and people who are interested in SEO — you’re not going to see immediate results. No matter how good you are, no matter how much work you’ve put in and done everything right, you won’t get to the first page of any search engine that first week (unless, of course, you’re going black hat, but that’s a whole different ball game). With everyone, it’s about managing expectations. You need to be realistic with your goals and then you won’t get disappointed. It’s not like you’d be able to get first place in a marathon without ever going for a jog before. Invest the time, work hard and you’ll eventually get those rankings.