I’d like to discuss a few facts about SEO that may help quench your questions and manage your expectations before you begin an SEO campaign. I thought this article would be helpful, since many people don’t really know what to expect with SEO. SEO is a very unique service and not one that can be paid for, applied, and left alone. It’s an ongoing science that must be sculpted, measured and applied repeatedly. Here we go…

1. SEO is ongoing:
SEO is a process. Depending on your competition, it could take months to reach your goals. It’s also not something that can be accomplished and walked away from. Once you’ve reached the first page of Google, you’ll need to maintain that status with regular content updates and link building from quality sites.

2. SEO is NOT about the amount of links you have:
SEO is always about the quality of work that’s being done. You may have 1,000 links pointing to your website, but if they are not quality (and relevant) websites then they won’t do you much good. – Try to get your website’s link placed on other websites. For example, if a very large site such as Wikipedia.org put your website’s address on their site you’d skyrocket in rankings. Google loves when other sites share each other’s content.

3. SEO can be slow:
SEO is a slow process, but that’s okay. Slow and steady wins the race. If you decide to jump into an SEO campaign, get ready to dedicate 5-6 months minimum to see results. The silver lining is that SEO is worth it.

4. Results are not guaranteed
We are just being honest here. Any agency that pitches you a #1 spot on Google is usually someone you should stay clear from. SEO is not magic – it’s a science. It’s not about building a few links and getting the site to rank top for keyword queries. It’s a lot more than that. If you look at a wider picture, you will realize that there are thousands of websites out there who want to rank within the top 10 for the very same keywords that you want to rank for. All these websites are using SEO services, and some are even paying a whole lot more than you can even afford.

5. You need a well-designed and usable website
Google is the world’s largest search engine. It sells a product to its customers. That product is simple this: highly relevant and engaging content based on internet searches. The more well designed, usable and modernized your site is, the higher rankings you’ll receive because Google wants to serve its customers with a good, usable product.

6. Your site should have well-constructed healthy code (html / css):
This is critical. Google doesn’t hire a staff of people to review websites. It uses small software spiders that crawl the actual code of your site. These software spiders are looking for certain elements inside your website’s structure. If errors are found, it can hurt your ranking. If no errors are found, it will improve it. Here is a tool you can use to see if your site is healthy or valid. Currently you have two errors on your home page: validator.w3.org

7. Content is king:
You should have engaging, readable content on your site (and lots of it). The best way to do this is to use a WordPress blog and write short, engaging articles about your products and business. With SEO content is king!

8. Meta Data:
Your site should have meta data that is relevant to your website’s content, and targeted towards the content you want people to be searching for. If your web person is a bit savvy they could probably use this simple template to generate meta tags and place them on your site: metatags.info/meta_tags_generator. For example, if you want your website to show up on Google for the search term “hand knitting yarns” then you should have this exact key phrase in your title meta data, your description meta data, in your URL and several times in website’s copy.