SEO, backlinks and patience

There's one big secret to SEM..............

Make it your backup plan.

Many people ignore properly thinking about how they're expecting to make money and outsource the concern to expecting their link building to make all the difference.

The most important thing you can remember about search engines is - YOU DON'T CONTROL THEM.

You can't "expect" ANY results. You literally have zero control.

you know what 'should' help, and what 'might' help - even what 'has worked for others', or 'worked in the past'.

but in reality - you have no reason to have any expectation of the search engines behaving in a certain way right now.

Yes, it's good to factor them in and give them food so that you've tipped the scales in your favour - but if you're trying to make a living from the internet you need a more robust plan.

Always have your seo be a 'supporting' factor in your business rather than expecting it to replace your business or be the only thing you care about.

If the search engines turned off tomorrow - you want to still have a business left (ask all the Adsense whores who had to go and get jobs when Google slapped them a couple of years ago).

This business needs a little more attention than throwing up stuff and hoping it sticks.

So - PPC will always work if you learn it properly.

You can find places that have real visitors and traffic and integrate with how they're getting it in many ways.

You can pay for advertising, or just be creative in how you attract attention.

But when it comes to search engine traffic - the only thing you can do wrong - is have expectations about things you don't control.

Do yourself a favor and learn this lesson now - it will save you a LOT of time and money.

Andy

I don't deal with it

Go out and write webmasters and bloggers and tell them about your site. Don't ask for links, just tell them about it and why they'd like it.

If you're embarrassed about doing this or don't have something worth writing about then make your site better.

If you're site is good links/people will follow.

Traffic you get from not google and by your own efforts is gold.

maybe go buy some traffic and see if your pages actually convert or make you any money if not you are wasting your time with the link building and trying to rank in the first place.

You must have patient.

I keep telling people to start with low competition keyword, even if the searches is low!

The problem that most people had with search marketing - lack of experience to rank on page 1. You must keep track your number of competition, and how fast you can rank for it, from there, slowly scale up your competition and accumulate more experiences with higher competition keyword.

Don't get frustrated with no traffic, you don't expect much traffic when you first started! As your gain more experience, you will start to find better traffic keywords that fall within your ability to rank!

Don't check your rank everyday, just don't do it!

I fall into this once, and now I only look at them weekly. Give your site and articles at least 1 week, and expect the worst of 3 weeks before rank.

What you need to do is keep finding more keywords, writing more articles and building more links. DON'T wait till you see result!

After 3 weeks, if your articles and site not rank, meaning the keyword you pick is too competitive! You need more back links and keep build more...

There is a point where you starts to see all articles ranked! And that is when you build up the confidence with SEO!!

When you pick keyword, try to find keywords with allintitle - less than 1K. You should be easily rank with those keywords in 1 or 2 weeks!

Don't go and track your result by day, do it by weeks! You have better things to do, just do it.

I once just like you, and it kills all my mood. When I start to realize the problem, I just have faith in it, throwing tons of resources to build back links until I see it rank!

Be patient, just do it! Have faith, just like religion and it will finally work out! Remember - track by week, not days!

- Kok Choon

I don't have any advice, because I am in the same boat as you. I have been working on getting traffic in other ways besides SE in the meantime. It's pretty satisfying to get traffic through articles or forum signatures as well. Also, you can augment your efforts through social bookmarking, RSS, and make sure you update content on your daily or even 2 times a day so that Google knows your site is dynamic. It does take a lot of patience, I have had a rough week because I ran out of cash for PPC and traffic has been meager to say the least.

You should probably also build backlinks to your backlinks. Do this by bookmarking on digg, propeller, make a blogger blog, anything that will make google stumble over your links. Things will go a lot faster (at least they have been going faster for me) after that.

I think having other projects going on at the same time helps a lot. If you're essentially nursing one website than your attention is focused on its progress (or lack there of). But having other sites to work on keeps you busy and you'll typically have them firing and keeping you positive.