haloha, how long does it take you to rank for a specific keyword? i am not talking about super long keywords or weird phrases that dont get any searches but about keywords that get decent amount of searches.
If you have domains that are already on Googles radar they can find you in minutes. I have tools to set up blogs - and google spider new sites in under a minute that it takes me to reset options to stop them following! It's also quite easy to get ranked in days for the keyword that is in your url with say a few thousand searches a month and tens of thousands of competitors. But the real problem is getting ranked high enough for enough keywords to get meaningful traffic to your site - that's what takes the time and effort with backlink building. Each keyword capable of generating $ probably also has competition with backlinks in place - and you need to create comparable numbers of backlinks, for each keyword.
in my case, with a brand new website, it took me almost one year to crack into the first page of google for a keyword that gets around 14.000 searches a month. this is the best result i got in search engine optimizing and i belive i could acheive it in half that time now, after seeing what works and what doesn't.
It depends on your niche and the competition of your niche. If the competition is too high then possibly you may never get good rank but if your nice's competition is low but getting a good amount of searches than it can take several days or several weeks, several months and above (Depends on your site content).
It also depends on your on site SEO strategy such as Meta tags, link building efforts and competition of course
How long is a piece of string? Competition, backlinks, age all come into it. To get a head start I will normally buy aged domains at auction and this seems to be a good start.
I think it varies a lot on the competition. For example, i'm ranking pretty quickly for one of my keywords that doesn't have too much competition for it. Another it took me about 3 months to rank for the keyword I was targeting and i'm still not #1, i'm #2.
If your website is well known to Google, a new page can rank for keywords within days — even in hours. I recall adding a new page and having Google pick it up in their rankings on their third page the same day. This of course is for keywords that are only moderately competitive. For the truly competitive ones, it will take significant time and effort.
I have ranked for keywords in 'one day' when my blog was really strong and I just made another page. There are some keywords on which I am working for more than a year now ;-)
We can say that, it depends on many factors, but usually if you have done good SEO, probably within weeks
CrisT. You are in the same boat as me. You don't need to be told about on/off page SEO as you would have picked this up along the way in the 12 months. I reckon with a brand new site, which it sounds what you're using, Yahoo and Bing will take you seriously in 1 month and Google 3 months. If anyone has got onto page 1 of Google in a week with a brand new site - I want to hear about it... (p.s. I hear it might be possible with a PR3+ aged domain and a 301 - redirect)
it still depends on the activities that you are doing for your site and competitiveness for the keywords that you are choosing to get ranked for..