Online Marketing Today

There’s an ad (commercial) on television here 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…

1. The search engine to find the incoming links in the first place (which can take time depending on the quality of the links).
2. The search engine to “revalue” those incoming links when it finds them again in the same spot on the same website.
3. All other search engine optimization ranking factors to be taken into consideration.
4. The search engine index to update.
5. 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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