3 Comments

Dispelling the Old “SEO-Is-A-One-Time-Deal” Myth

Oct 28, 2006
by

My oh my. Time to show off those SEO gardening gloves again (more on our craft’s basic attire in a moment).

David Pasternack, president and co-founder of Did-it (a notable search engine marketing firm), just took a few digs at SEO firms. In his DMNews article, “Troubled times for SEO firms,” Pasternack claims that “SEO is a job that is essentially a one-time task, not a continuing responsibility requiring the services of an outside firm.”

Really?

Well-researched “insights” like that do little more than perpetuate the myth that one shot is enough when it comes to SEO.

It would be brazen of me to suggest for a second that reasonably educated people can’t succeed with just one round of optimization.

They can. I’m especially amused by the folks who rank well for decent terms and get traffic and sales without knowing what they did in the first place.

With so many websites, inadvertent success is inevitable.

What Pasternack and others overlook is that natural SEO typically takes time – a lot of time. In official language, we call it iterations. In simple language, it’s called tweaking.

So you’re ranking #20. Big deal. Fine-tuning kicks in and you’re #16. Big deal. You try something else and you’re #10. Now you’re talking. Then you try to appeal to more than one search engine at the same time and the subtle adjustments get a little tougher.

Natural (organic) SEO takes time, just like prepping and maintaining that beautiful garden.

Why? It’s because you need to work hard to make improvements while keeping influential forces in mind – factors like the nature of keywords and their relationship to one another, amount of content, links to the site, link descriptions, links within a site, META descriptions, page titles, age of pages, number of pages, page headers, proper use or abuse of alt tags, page names, calls to action, and on and on and on.

One-time SEO works, especially if you’re starting from scratch. You can see an improvement. But anything beyond that takes a concerted effort by professionals who happen to know a thing or two about what they’re doing.

Filed under: Search Engine Marketing
  • http://www.cumbrowski.com Carsten Cumbrowski

    I agree with you. It is not an One-Time Job.

    However, it is true that in most cases the initial “clean up” of a site (site structure, crawlability etc.) will have the biggest impact and is the most important one a SEO Firm has to do (and should charge the most IMO).

    After the initial Job is in most cases less work necessary, but you can’t just sit there and do nothing. How much ongoing work is necessary depends a lot on the market you operate in and what your competition is doing.

    My 2 cents.

  • http://www.cumbrowski.com Carsten Cumbrowski

    There is an interesting discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums that took place about this topic.

    It’s always good to hear all sides of the story.
    Cheers,
    Carsten

  • http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=4045 Search Engine Journal

    The end of SEO will be here by friday. Just right in time for the tea.

    Dave Pasternack from the SEM/PPC Firm Did-I could not resist it.
     
    He had to post at his DMNews.com Blog the story titled “An SEO critic answers his critics“, which is in fact a direct sequel to his post “Troubled times for SEO firms…