The topic of SEO is flying around everywhere these days, it seems. Everyone wants to be #1 on Google. Everyone wants to be there as soon as possible.

There are two things, though, to keep in mind.

1. SEO, done correctly, takes time.

Thanks to recent updates to the algorithm, Google is now on the lookout for techniques that appear spammy. If your site suddenly appears on hundreds of directories overnight, this looks like spam and Google penalizes you for it.

They’re also, as we’ve mentioned briefly before, looking for content on your site that looks like it’s meant for human consumption. The more natural your writing, the better.

That brings us to the more important point of the two:

2. If you’re just launching a brand new site, now is NOT the time to invest heavily in SEO services.

Why do we say that? Don’t we want to propel your site to the top of the results, at light speed?

There’s an art and a science to achieving favorable rankings. The first, most basic thing to consider is, we need a history of traffic to look at, so we can analyze how your site performs: what’s working and what’s not. Any attempt at an in-depth SEO program, without several weeks of data to draw from, is fortune telling at best.

Remember that your Web site should be an investment, not an expense. As such, you want to exercise wisdom in your expenditures. A comprehensive SEO plan with no insight into past performance only gives you a moderate chance of success. Imagine buying a house that fails a safety inspection, and the inspector says “Well, the house is standing now, and it might keep standing for a good long while yet. Or it might fall down on your head tomorrow.” Would buying that house, with that uncertainty, be a good investment of all that money? Similarly, a full-speed-ahead SEO plan with no history to reference provides a lot of uncertainty but not necessarily a ton of value.

With these things in mind, please be careful when vetting a Web marketing firm. If they are gung ho about an all-out SEO blitz before you’ve even launched the site, that should be a big red flag.

Photo by Martin Fisch