It totally depends on your SEO.. Your keyword must be related to your website niche, Do some natural ways of SEO to get top position search engines.. Minimum it will takes 3 to 5 months to get high position in google....
If you are doing white hat SEO and choosing all high quality sites for promotion so it will take 4-5 months.
I agree with you about competition. If there is little competition you can easily make a page to get even first position for a keyword within a day or week depending on the spidering frequency. There are people who fool others about high ranking for keywords showing that their site is ranked number #1 for that keyphrase but that phrase is not popular. An example is a google search for "link deception" which brings you to a site only 2 months old.
+1 It can take even 3 - 5 years of constant work to outrank a highly competitive keyword. Here's an example o http://www.webmd.com that's currently ranking #1 for weight loss I remember one of their SEO guys have purchase 4 homepage links on some of my weight loss sites two years back when webmd.com was roughly #10,000 Alexa .... (hope Google doesn't penalize them for purchasing links, lol) They've even outranked wikipedia Now they're ranking #1 for weight loss and their traffic has exponentially exploded.... They're ranking for thousands of other keywords too ....
I started a fun site whoisbid that has been up for 60 days. During this time I dedicated a few pages opening my webstats to the world to see. It has taken 2 months to even begin to start getting some traffic from search engines. New sites are put through some kind of test don't you think? You are being quarantined like animals. Its very easy to get high positions in search engines with old "trusted sites" that have been scanned by Google radar for a period of time. Its almost too easy for some. These old sites (if they are good) get spidered numerous times a day compared to something new. At some point Google will trust you.. I think it depends on many factors . Most people will give up.. so maybe this quarantine is like Google's "manhood test" - LOL !
With Same seo skill, it can be different for low competitive and high competitive keywords.. so that matter is competition
Some people have a knack for writing in a manner that attracts attention to digital robots (se spiders). I guess those people have writing skills but they have been trained over the years to write for spiders and not just people. I miss the old Kung Fu movies where Grasshopper had to keep listening to his master. My guess is that many of you have learned to write for digital masters. Over time you know what they want and how to feed them and don't need analytics to do it.
i would like to add that if you are working alone (without help from website mafia groups ) it is going to be a lot more difficult because you can't organize for your mafioso friends to add "do follow" links from high PR sites over a planned period of time. You are on your own and thus you have to be even more inventive. I think a lot of young people who like playing certain online RPG's knowing how long it takes to get "hit points" on your own and have refused to join a guild will probably do much better in this game we are all playing. Those characters on the games find ways to become powerful without joining a guild or mafia. If these young people can spend weeks trying to kill digital monsters on their own they surely must have a lot of patience or a very strong will which could be tapped into doing something productive (monetization)
Unfortunately because of commercial ignorance many SEO's do not get the recognition they deserve. This means that a lot of companies who don't understand the mechanism are not willing to pay experienced freelancers for serious optimization i.e. if you are not respected enough, you are not going to get paid enough for a project. This question of "how long it takes to get ranking" is very important to anyone who is going to embark on a project. If we don't have any idea of the time and effort it is going to take to get some reasonable progress we could end up giving up half way through. My guess is that more than 99% of people will give up. If you for example know that it is going to take 6 months to a year to take a certain competitor by the b*lls - how much is your time worth? If you spend 10 hours a day for 365 days helping someone else's project are you getting paid enough? The answer is probably No! If you do find someone who really understands and is willing to throw a decent amount of money into the project you are really fortunate and should cherish those kinds of clients because they are up to date and appreciate the amount of effort that is required. Those clients should be paying you much more than you could ever earn from adsense in a year so that you do not lose enthusiasm because of lack of proper financial rewards.
By "Rank", if you mean to say in search results than it is a matter of time. But to "rank" on page 1 for a k/w or to target top locations, it takes time if you go with "WHITE HAT" seo. It will depend on the competetion & efforts/ strategies that you will use. Timeline cannot be given.
I think I can add something to widen people's thoughts. When we consider "keywords" it is a plural. Some people are targeting a few keywords, some doing hundreds and yet others thousands. You can see in the stats program normally it will rank your most popular keywords e.g. 1 of 20, 1 of 100, 1 of 5000 etc. Mammoth websites will be found by all sorts of keywords and in a sense cannot fail. If you brake your back every day and become a slave to your website by eating, living and breathing it continually to result in thousands of pages of unique content you will most probably get more than 1 visitor per day.
Usually it will show up 1 to 3 days after the page has been indexed by Google. What take so long is the time it takes to register IB links to that site (page). If you are not doing quality link building, then you have no chance to show up for competive keywords no matter how good your on-page SEO is. It is also very important to have the anchor text of the IB link match the title of the webpage it links to.
I still believe it takes minimum of 6 months to be on 1st page for a very competitive keyword for a brand new site anything faster than that time frame is usually black hat. I never try to rank for 2 many keywords i right away go for the most competitive ones and then to the less competitive over time.
is there any other criteria? such as the total number of visitors each month? I mean for example PR 1 should be more of the thousands of visitors
Dude, SPECIFY!!! For a 1million dollar keyword it can take 5 years to rank and for something like "how long does it take you to rank" you gte ranked on first page after getting indexed. Stop asking retarded questions and get to work