Search Engine Optimization (or, if you want to be technically correct, Search Marketing) is not a ‘get rich quick’ scheme nor is it about getting short-term, temporary results at the risk of getting your website banned by the search engines.

Just to make things clear, this is not an ethical concern for me – as far as I am concerned (you might think differently), search engines provide a service, and their guidelines are not ‘the law’, they are just generalized statements on what works best.

Those statements are a bit misleading and do not give a complete picture of what it takes to rank for keywords in the search engine result pages (SERPs).

However, putting your website at risk by actively pursuing optimization policies that openly violate search engine policies and are detectable by search engines is foolishness.

Personally (once again, you are entitled to your opinion) I think there are far better ways to dominate the SERPs without resorting to tricks or anything that will get your website banned from Google or MSN or Yahoo.

So that is one aspect of thinking long term – if you are doing SEO for short term gains, in most cases it is not SEO but tricks to take advantages of a search engine’s limitations.

Another aspect of long term SEO is your SEO strategy itself. SEO is a process that invariably takes time – certain factors used to determine rankings in Google, for example, use time as an element in their calculations.

Concepts such as link-aging, the sandbox (or the trustbox, depending on your perspective), quality filters and domain-aging (do not worry, I will explain these concepts in full detail later on in this blog) mean that you cannot be #1 overnight – at least not in Google.

For the two examples I listed in the previous post - Customize Your SEO Strategy (Site A and Site B):

• Site A would take anywhere between a month and 6 months to get to #1, depending on what you do and

how strong the #1 ranked site really is.

• For Site B, it would take you 6 to 12 months to get to the top, once again depending on how fast you

move and which keywords you are targeting.

Bottom line – SEO takes time to be effective, so whatever you are planning, make sure you plan for the long run and consider long term consequences of your actions.

Until next time! See you around ... ;-)