Seo Services Spain Blog

Quite often I am asked by clients who want to rank well for their keywords but who are not that familiar with the whole search engine and SEO process, how long it will take them to “get to #1″. As a search engine optimizer, it can be frustrating to have clients who are very impatient and just want to get that coverted spot on Google.

I can understand that a client wants to have their site rank as quickly as possible in order to start bringing in new business and revenue and know that this is the ultimate objective with organic SEO but it is important that the client is made fully aware from the outset, that it takes time to rank high in the SERPS(search engine results page’s) especially when you have a lot of keyword competition.

If you are an SEO yourself, then it is your responsibility to make your client aware from the word go that Rome really wasn’t built in a day and that building good search engine positioning is an on-going process.

Indexation

Clients need to be made aware that it can take anything from a week to 2 months for your site and its pages to become indexed in the search engines. To those who do not know, this is the time it takes for the search engines to “discover” your site, whether by you submitting a sitemap to the engine or via the search engine finding your site from an external link to it. Once pages are indexed they can then be presented within the search engine results.

Ranking

Another thing worth noting is that just because your pages are indexed in the search engines and you may or may not have a number of good links pointing to those pages with the correct anchor text, does not been that you will start ranking straight away. Google has a sandbox algorithm that prevents sites from ranking too quickly for search terms. This was designed to prevent spammy websites popping up overnight and then dissappearing again after making a killing. Google especially uses the sandbox very well to prevent this. Some people believe it is the ageing affect of the links that causes this, ie you build links and these links only come into effect once they have “aged” significantly. I know and have seen from experience that if you try to rank for a fairly competitive term you will not see any ranking results for at least 3 months, possibly 6.

Link Building

One of the most important jobs of any SEO is to carry out on-going regular link building for the clients site. Especially with the major engines, links to your site act as a vote. The more links you have to your main landing pages, the better you will rank. Quality and quantity are the main aims. There is obviously a lot more to link building than getting lots of links though. Links need to be of a high quality from high page rank pages that are relevant to your niche. Although nearly all links represent a certain amount of value and “weight”, it is these that the search engines value the most and are the ones you should be seeking out.

Another aspect of link building that clients do not realise is that links you create today, may not be seen and valued by the search engines for weeks. This is due to the crawl rate of the search engines to the linking page. So for example, if you contact a site owner who has a good relevant site and manage to get a link to your site out of them, the link that they place to your site may not be indexed by the search engines for some time which is why the “value” may not be seen for a number of weeks.

SEO takes patience, for both client and optimizer. Slow and steady is the key when link building. Building links too fast and the search engines may see this as un-natural and could mark you as a spammer. So remember, build links as naturally as possible.

Another thing worth mentioning is LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing which is something that is being used now by Google and soon Yahoo and most probably MSN/Live. For a more detailed explanation of LSI please have a read of Aaron Walls guide to Latent Semantic Indexing

LSI is a very complex subject, but in its most basic form is the process of comparing words and the relationships between words. So for example, suppose that you mention the word bike on one of your pages but fail to mention the word “bicycle”. The search engine algorithms know that these words are the same thing and that if they also see the words “peddle”, “saddle” and “brakes” etc that this page is all about bikes/bicycles or is relevant to this subject.

So what does this mean for an SEO? Well, for a start it means that worthless links from none related pages to your pages will not be valued. The search engines will know in a heart beat that that link you have from a high ranking page on “space exploration” is not of any real value as that page is not really relevant.

It will also mean that we all need to start creating better quality content on our pages. Its been known for a long time that the best way to get inbound links is by creating great content that people want to link too and read. I think that the fact that search engines do(in google’s case) and will(in Yahoo!’s case) be able to use LSI to help rank pages and value links, means that the more quality content we write and add to our sites, the more the search engines will be able to categorise these pages better and this will obviously help to rank the page better.

I think LSI will help to make the web “cleaner” in regards to the filtering out of spammy crappy websites that are set up only for the purpose of making a quick buck via adwords or affiliate programs and do not include any real informational content.

I think it will be in everybody’s interest that the sites that are most relevant for a search term are in fact the ones that do appear at the top of the SERP’s.

So it looks like both client and SEO will have to start thinking a lot differently in regards to the kind of value their sites possess in the eyes of both the web viewer and the search engines alike.