Follow-up
Follow-up is also an essential part of your SEO plan. Many people believe they can develop and
implement an SEO plan and then just walk away from it. The truth is, however, that SEO is not just
a one-time event. It’s an ongoing process that requires testing, monitoring, and often re-building.A good plan for conducting follow-ups is to plan for them quarterly. Some companies will choose to
follow up and reassess their SEO bi-annually, but to be truly effective quarterly is much better. One
thing to keep in mind, however, is that following up on your SEO efforts too soon is non-productive.
In many cases, it takes at least three months to get a clear picture of how successful your efforts are.
Conducting an evaluation before that three-month mark could have you chasing after an elusive SEO
goal that doesn’t really exist. Or worse, it could lead you away from a successful strategy.Give your plan at least three months but no more than six between checkups. Once you create the
habit of re-evaluating your SEO efforts on that time schedule, it will be much less time consuming
than you assume.Understanding Organic SEO
All this talk about planning for SEO is great, but what about organic SEO. You don’t have to put any
efforts into that, do you?Don’t go foolin’ yourself. Organic SEO is just as much work as any other type of SEO. It’s just a
little different method of creating a site optimized for search ranking, without having to imple-
ment any new technologies or spend a lot of time submitting your site to different primary and
secondary search engines. And really, the distinction here is a very general one. Only SEO purists
consider “real SEO” as being strictly organic — meaning you use no fee-based services whatever.
Most people are happy with “just plain SEO,” which usually means a combination of organic and
fee-based. It’s best if you just think of SEO as just SEO; then you don’t have to worry about dis-
tinctions that aren’t really important in optimizing your web site.The definitions of organic SEO vary a little, depending on whom you talk to. Some SEO experts think
it’s all about optimizing the content of your web site to catch the attention of the crawlers and spiders
that index sites. Others think it’s the number of quality links you can generate on your site. But in
truth, organic SEO is a combination of those and other elements, such as site tagging, that will natu-
rally place your web site in search engine rankings. How high in those rankings depends on how well
you design your site.But before you go thinking that organic SEO is just the solution you’ve been looking for, take a step
back. What organic SEO is not is an easy way to land in a search engine. Basically, if you put a web
site online and spend a little time getting it ready for the world to see, you will have probably
achieved some measure of organic SEO without really trying.23
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