Being new to SEO, am wondering how long it would take before results can be seen. I realise different keywords take a different amount of time to rank for, so I am wondering how long it has taken you to reach top 10 google results for your keyword and how much competition the keyword fetches? Being a newbie, I want to avoid working on a tough keywords, trying to find out what keywords would be a good starting point to see some nice traffic comming in without having to spend years trying to optimise the site. Cheers.
If you have 10 SEO specialists and 5 excellent content writers. You can do a lot including PR-10 in 10 months...
Yes, I have had some good results on fairly competitive keywords in very competitive niches. It all amounts to time. I got there in 3 weeks, but bounced for the next 15 months before settling down. to page 1 (for the last year or so) When starting out, go for as many long-tail keywords as you can and work up to more generic terms from there. Have at least 1 page on your site dedicated to the long-tail word and work it until you rank well. Once you have several long-tail words, then it is time to start trimming the tail and put together everything you have done to get a better ranking for more competitive terms. Do not dismiss how those long-tail pages will help you when you start looking at the more competitive terms. Chasing the long tail is not a waste of time.
It took me about 4 to 5 months to get a new domain to page 1 for a search term with 31,000,000 results. Getting a subdomain of an existing, older site to the same position took about 3 weeks. For the new domain it took a lot of work both on-page and with link-building.
If your running a blog Googles QDF ((Quality Deserves Freshness) I think thats right) will help you rank for posts but will drop your down. I try to get good post title on blogs and rank well for those for a day or 2 (making 3-4 posts a day...). As long as you link build with the same keyphrases that you have on the site from the get go you should be ok. Obviosly content optimisation will help you in the long run aswell but I dont think its always important. If you have a seller site or info site (nonblog) then get everything perfect before you even buy the domain because hte longer you faff around with it the longer it will take you to rank well. After 7 months im still not page 1 for my keyphrase but I have major players in my way. I often have fresh quality posts on the front page just not my main term.
I started targeting the keywords offshore hosting when I was doing some seo for my website after I had bought a new skin. I created building backlinks for it,I wrote about it on several forums,did some stumbling,etc... After a few months it was at the top of the 2nd page on google and now it's ranked 4th on the 1st page after more than a year.