J Gibbs recently emailed me with the question: “so how long does this SEO stuff take?” J is a client of mine. He was not upset, or being snarky. He genuinely wanted to have a feel for how progress was to be made.

Good search engine optimization takes an investment in time. Too often, our society has the expectation that we ought to be able to just do some “dark SEO magic,” click a button, and we done. Boom! That is just not the case. The game played with our search engines changes all the time. We are also competing against all the other businesses that want the same business.

If you are a small business, try investing 30 minutes a day in adding good content to your site, blogs, articles, videos, etc. Add links to your site. Make good use of social media. In time, it pays off. If you don’t want to invest the time yourself, find someone to help you.

In the healthcare It world, and I suspect other IT worlds, we have used a process for years to evalute how well our optimization efforts are working.

1. Set a clear goal for what you want to accomplish. You should know how many people have to visit your site to generate one sale. You should know how many people need to visit your site every day. Step one may be this easy. Step two may be to get analytics on your site, so you do know how many are coming.

2. Set a plan on where you want your business source. Good analytics can tell you how customers got to your website. If all your business is coming from Twitter, let’s say, and you are doing all your optimization on some obscure website that is not in your demographic, you are wasting time.

3. Decide who you want to target: Age, Sex, Income, all that. Do research on where your demographic is spending time online. Target some of those places for SEO. Do some testing to make sure you are getting return for your time investment.

4. Implement a plan based upon your testing.

5. Measure the results. Zero based thinking applies here. If something is not working, change it.

6. Adjust or optimize your plan.

So, you can continue to improve this process through the old 4 step plan: measure, report, analyze, optimize It will be worth the time you spend, if you put metics to your process.

Ray Province

Ray Province is an IT programmer in the healthcare industry and owner of Celtic Ozark Solutions, an IT company that specializes in website development, SEO, and social media marketing. You can reach Ray at celticozarksolutions@gmail.com or @celticozarkian on Twitter.

I wanted to share some thoughts on why everyone should be doing some search engine optimization to their website business. Namely, I want to share 3 common misunderstandings about search engine optimization. As much good information as there is on the Internet, it still amazes me that I hear these all the time. I’m not griping; it is good for business!

1. The first commonly misunderstood notion about SEO is that it is not important to do at all. A customer of mine recently said to me, “why bother with this SEO stuff anyway, it only gets people to my site. It doesn’t make them buy!” In one sense of the word, this is true. SEO is an “art” that is designed to help people find your website from search engines, emails, social media sites, etc. To use an analogy, it sets people into your storefront. In today’s world, though, that is huge! There are literally millions of websites out there world wide. Without some help, you almost have a better change of winning a lottery than someone finding your website.

1. The second commonly misunderstood concept is what I like to call “if you build it, they will come.” This type of marketing centers more on just having a website that is a “landing page” or “squeeze page.” A landing page just wants you to enter an email, and then you can look at the store. There are many of these types of websites out there, that you will find making lots of money with Google PR ratings of O. In most cases, these sites are owned by famous people, or people with massive email lists, that just need a place to market the next affiliate product. You can be “lured in” by offers from some of these places to build websites free, or for a small amount of money. Unless you plan on getting famous first, you might want to do some SEO. If you want an example of 2 people that still do SEO, take a look at Terry Wygal or Jeff Johnson.

1. The final commonly misunderstood concept centers around the idea that “SEO is a one time setup.” Savvy website designers will now optimize your website to be “SEO friendly.” Then, the process stops. The site is prepared, but articles, blogs, emails, videos, audios, banners, pictures all need to be made SEO friendly. I try to do 30min of work on SEO every day for my sites. This is a great way for small business owners to really help their website. Of course, you can outsource this task to others as well. Elance.com is a good source for this type of help.

Till next time,

Ray Province

Celtic Ozark Solutions

Ray Province is an IT programmer in the healthcare industry, and owner of Celtic Ozark Solutions. The company specializes in hardware sales and installation, website development, SEO, and social media integration. You can reach Ray at celticozarksolutions@gmail.com or @celticozarkian on Twitter.