Does Search Engine Optimization Last?

One of my clients asked me some great questions recently…

Does the link building have to be done every month? If I don’t do it every month, does that mean my site will fall by the wayside again?

Once a site is optimized, does a person have to keep re-doing the optimization? If they don’t keep paying an SEO… does it mean the site will again fall into ether-land?

Below Are My Answers:

Think about your online efforts – website, optimization, link building and Facebook, etc. as marketing and advertising. In comparing and assuming the ads work, if you stop buying ads, do they still keep working?

You stop buying ads and the customers you get from the ads stop! So it all takes maintenance and attention… either you do it or you hire someone.

Link building gets it’s best results to increase your position on all search engines from being ongoing. Just like your website is never done, adding links to your website is never done either.

If you were to just not do any link building, your site would eventually fall in rank for 3 main reasons – 1. Google gives sites with increased links and new content better ranks; 2. The competition is doing online marketing, and… 3. Some of the old links will disappear.

Your rank comes from the content on your site and the links to that content. That’s the big picture. There are lots of details after that but in the big scheme, continually adding content and getting more links to your site will keep your rank growing or stable.

A simplified but useful way of looking at things is to examine your current linking. In this case, the site being discussed shows about 60 links right now… (these numbers are approximate from Yahoo Site Explorer)

To compare, the top 10, page one SERP competition for “keyword term” pages – range from 70 to 7,000 links to that page on their sites (not the whole site.) To get you on the first page for that term we have to get you more than 70 links to your subject page. That guideline applies to each page and subject.

We could build you thousands of links in the next week, but I know that will get your site sandboxed (penalized) by Google, ie. not showing at all in search. We do it gradually, safely and through watching the traffic, attend to each part of the site as needed.

Another thing to keep in mind is what will the competition do in response to your increase in web marketing? Chances are they are going to spend more money and time optimizing and advertising! It’s competitive out there.

For instance, I know from many conversations that business people are pulling their ad money from YellowPages and using that to do online marketing. Google and Facebook are the new YellowPages for local small businesses.

Once your pages are optimized there is no need to redo them. We don’t use any gimmicks – what we do on-page works now and for many years to come.