Over the past week, I have been watching one of my twin sons start to crawl. It has been an amazing experience for this first time dad, as I watch him grunt and struggle to just move an inch or so. He would get frustrated, take a break and start up again. He has not figured out how to use his knees yet, he is really just sliding across the carpet, but he can get where he wants to go now. His crawling is really exciting for me, but I would guess that you the reader really do not care about my son learning to crawl. As I watched him do it, the thought of SEO came to mind. There is no magic bullet for SEO. No matter how much money you spend , it is the time that is put into it that will make it a successful or unsuccessful venture. The strategy is not born overnight, it takes a lot of work, and trial and error to accomplish the goal.
As the SEO project is started there is a ton of painstaking research to be done. Just as a baby uses tummy time to start to build the muscles to crawl and coordination to crawl, you are building the base of the words that you will target to draw people to your site. It can be very frustrating to go through the hundreds of words and phrases that are on your potential list of keywords. Looking at all the misspellings, alternate words, slang, jargon, and abbreviations, can make you feel like you are stuck in the same place. Then all the sudden you look up, and you have what you believe is a strong list of keywords, that are the correct balance of high searched, with lower competition. You have reached the second stage.
Just as the baby reaches this stage they start to push up with their arms, and can get up on their knees, but can’t really figure out how to move. You now have what you believe is a great list of words. It is time to start integrating them into your meta tags, page content, and links. At this point you have put a lot of time into your SEO, and have not attracted one customer. A feeling of anxiety and frustration can start to take over. Combing over every single word and page of your website can lead to the feeling of never moving forward. Finally you come to the end, you think that the page is optimized and is ready to start attracting thousands of hits a day. The baby is now able to move their body, it maybe backwards, sliding on the floor, or scooting, but they have figured out how to get where they want to go, but we would not call it crawling yet.
The site is made live and with anticipation you check your Google Analytics account every five minutes waiting for that rush of hits on your website. This excitement of moving wears off after a short time when the baby realizes that they still are not moving as fast as they would like or whatever makes them continue to work to crawl on the hands and knees. This is where patience needs to be exhibited. It takes time for your site to be looked at by the search engines, and for them to really get to see what your site is all about. This is when it is very important to continue to monitor what is going on with your site. The baby has now reached a point where they can crawl, but they are entering the stage where they will be learning how to move correctly, they will enter the trial and error of learning where they can go, what they can go on, what will hurt them, and what is off limits.
For the baby they will progress to walking with in a few months and will continue to grow, will learn to run, jump and play. I have not experienced these stages with my sons, so I have no idea how it relates to SEO. For the SEO part of this blog, the trial and error part will never be over. You will constantly be looking at what is going on, and looking to improve the words that are not preforming well, and seeing how to make the words that are working work better. The review stage never ends.