Imagine this, you are asked to order food online. Most of the time you'll know exactly what to do but what if you are asked to search for houses available for sale/rent. This becomes a tricky situation where you might feel the need to find the best house rental service, provider. You might agree that we solve most of these problems by surfing the internet (in most case Google).
Naturally, the top results that Google feeds us are 80% of the time more relevant to us. This is because ranking from SEO proves whether a business is profitable or not. So SEO is something that would tempt you to rack your brains to take your website to the top.
Through this example, one might have got a slight understanding of exactly, what is SEO?
In simpler words, SEO is the process of optimising your content in such a way that search engines show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.
So how long do you think an SEO take? It's digital right? So logically it should take not more than a few seconds or minutes at most? Wrong. SEO can take as little as a few minutes to as long as 6 months! However, the length of time it takes depends upon several factors such as how old your site is, its authority, penalties or if you're aiming for long term or short term results. So there's no magic bullet for SEO as it takes time, planning and readjusting to achieve the ranking you wish to maintain. Now that the basic definition of an SEO is cleared, we all should be aware that there are two sides of an SEO force, i.e. White hat and Black hat.
If you’re playing a long term entrepreneurial game instead of getting a quick buck out of it, you’ll probably go for a White hat SEO. Your focus mainly would be the human audience or your consumers. You’d like to play according to the search engine rules and provide the best content possible.
Just the opposite of it is the Black hat SEO which is a get-rich-quick scheme wherein you’d bend and break the rules to get your site to a high rank. Although this may fetch you a few thousand dollars fast, it's risky, unethical and most importantly you are unfair to your audience. If you look for speedy results, this tactic can end up hurting you as Google is nowadays suspicious of any website that has a sudden increase in ranking. So, when aiming for a higher ranking website, it’s best to think long-term, even if you’ll have to wait a while to see the results you want.
So to speak, the time taken by the SEO depends on your website, how long it has been around, how much SEO has been taken on it previously. The following are the possible scenarios that may occur when you publish your website.
Each new quality link to your site increases the chances of the search engine spiders to run across your site for the searchers looking for services or products like yours. Websites like Google views links to your site as votes for your site and rewards the site accordingly. You can check your link popularity with a variety of tools online.
SEO results grow over time. It is always better to go through a long process that will reap us better benefits that will help our customers in a way that it will create a great website that will be in the market for the long run than to apply risky shortcuts that are unethical.