The Real Truth About SEO

In this article I’m going to give you some real truths about SEO and try to clear up any nonsense that you might have heard lately about search engine optimization and ranking websites. Some may tell you that it takes months and years to rank for certain phrases, and some people tell you that it is not even worth trying to rank for that phrases because it’s simply “too” higher competition, well let’s discover the real truth, right here on this article...

So, will it take months and years for you to rank your website? – The honest answer is maybe, yep that’s the truth it really could take years and months because that is how SEO is, but it all depends on the competition level of the keyword that you want to rank for. - I personally have managed to rank for the term SEO Consultant in the UK for my new website in only 1-2 months. (Currently bottom of page 1, but it is great progress considering!) Anyway...

If you are going after long tail keywords then you’ll be okay and chances are you’ll rank very quickly within a few days or weeks, however if you are going after high competition keywords then it could take months of hard work for you to finally get that ranking you deserve, often big SEO campaigns can be anywhere from 6 months to 2 years, and even then the campaign will need a lot of maintenance to actually keep the SEO ranking where it should be.

So is there a secret ranking method to getting number 1, or ranking quickly?

Nope, there isn’t at all, I’m sorry to burst your bubble if that is what you were hoping for, but there really isn’t a magic formula that works, SEO can be broken down into many different things be ultimately you can group it into two main things:

1)      On-Page SEO

2)      Off-Page SEO

On-page SEO is making sure that the content and layout of your website is optimized for your keywords as much as possible. By placing your main keyword in the title tag and making sure your pages are keyword rich you’ll give yourself a better chance at ranking well in the search engines because it will be far more clear to Google what phrase you actually want to rank for.

Off-page SEO is content creation and link building. When competition is low on longer tail keywords then link building is not always necessary however when it comes to high competition phrases then link building is absolutely crucial and it is extremely important if you really want to rank well.

Links can be built in many different ways, these include forums, articles, link bait and comments and there’s also a range of other methods! – There is no secret formula to links though, and as Matt Cutts has said, if you create content that is good, people will link to it!

In a perfect world SEO’s would not exist because people would create exceptional content that people naturally linked to, but unfortunately because people don’t do this, SEO’s like myself do exist, we create content, build links, promote content and deal with on-page SEO in order to get the site as optimized as possible for keywords.

If you can create good content, make sure your pages are optimized for your keywords, and you can build links then you will naturally obtain a good search engine ranking.

Author Bio

Mark Sherris is a SEO Consultant from the UK, visit his website for a 100% free website audit and consultation: www.MarkSherris.com