At this very moment, a seismic shift is taking place in the world of search engine optimization. You might not have noticed it yet, but if you are one of the hundreds of millions of people who use Google every day, you're going to shortly. So what are these big changes? In a nutshell,...

Often, when a new client comes to us, they're interested in search engine optimization because they know they can revolutionize the performance of their website or online business. In their enthusiasm, they begin to list their biggest SEO goals – which usually resolve into having one of the...

In the last article, we mentioned that it can take an average of 3 to 6 months – or even longer – for a search engine optimization campaign to show substantial bottom-line results. Naturally, this isn’t great news for a lot of online marketers, who aren’t exactly the most patient group in the world.

And so, it’s no surprise that their next question is often: “what can we do to speed things up?”

Unfortunately, the short answer is nothing. Search engine optimization takes as long as it takes because the process involves not only adding fresh content to your site, but having Google, Yahoo, and Bing index it again and again to see what sort of material you’ve added. Over time, the major search engines should begin to see that your site is “more important” – or at least more important than your competitors’ sites – and begin to move you up to one of the top spots.

But while there isn’t a lot you can do to affect your placement in the organic listings, there are two things you can do to bump up the traffic right away. The first is to simply pay for clicks. PPC advertising isn’t all that new, so we won’t spend a lot of time on it here, other than to point out that paid traffic, despite the expense, can sometimes be more efficient, since it’s targeted and tends to attract buyers.

The second way to speed up your results is by building incoming links from other related sites. This has the double effect of bringing in quality short-term traffic, as well as improving your search engine position in the future. As we’ve written in the past, inbound links are becoming an ever-increasing part of the search engine mix, so it’s never a bad idea to get started early.

There might not be a shortcut to the top of Google’s organic listings, but at least online marketers can simulate the effects by drawing traffic and setting themselves up for future growth.

You might have noticed that, throughout our series of articles, there is a lot of advice about what you should usually do, or what makes sense in most cases. That's because search engine optimization means different things to different people; because all marketers have individual goals, there...

For all of the metrics and search engine marketing goals that we discuss, both in person with clients and in articles and forums like this blog, it sometimes gets lost that there are actually a couple different kinds of search terms and key phrases that matter to marketers. Some industries...