We hear this a lot: “You optimized my web site last week, why haven’t my rankings improved?” The customer who has shelled out their hard earned money to have their web site improved for the purpose of better rankings is naturally eager to see tangible results. Unfortunately… this is not an overnight process by any means. Search engine optimization is a constantly evolving technology. As the search engines improve their processes, so does the tactics of optimizing web sites.
Let’s look at the process from start to finish. Your site is bland and you hire a search engine optimization firm to improve it. First, the site is usually revamped to enhance its navigation scheme (how easy people can move around the site) as well as other improvements. Then the site must be created and posted to the hosting server. Only now can the search engine spiders (those little programs that crawl around the Internet and catalog web sites) find the new and improved site. It may take a few weeks before the spider comes around to your little corner of the Internet. The search engines then take time to incorporate this information into their indexes. Add to this the...