It’s a truth universally acknowledged that there are no quick fixes in the land of search engine optimization. Months and even years can be lost in the hunt for that elusive position one ranking, particularly when your hopes center on ultra competitive keywords like real estate and cell phone.
So why is it that we’re constantly told that you can do SEO in-house with just a few spare minutes a day? Optimization is something of a misnomer – yes it is a long term undertaking without guarantees and very often without immediate results but at the same time, it doesn’t need to consume your every waking minute.
Daily optimization activity is usually reserved for position maintenance rather than dramatically increasing search engine ranking, making it feasible that half an hour a day is a sufficient chunk out of the diary. Something simple such as adding or updating content is a regularly required task and one that potentially could be done in any kind of timeframe. So just what is possible in half an hour each day?
Content
Updating old content must be spread over a number of days and couldn’t realistically be done in just one slot. It could however occupy a week or two of the timetable. Within this time frame, work such as going through the site and assessing existing content would take place and pages to be tweaked and refreshed identified. To do this properly and then update the older text is a big undertaking but depending on the size and nature of the site, could be sectioned off in to half hour chunks. If you have products that are particularly seasonal, prioritizing those pages and making a clear work order will save lots of wasted time.
Once work flow has been established, changing text or writing new content can take minutes or days. There’s no set time frame to say that content must be written before the click chimes the hour so, it could be done in any spare minute of the day. But (and there is always a but) non-professional writers, even seasoned website publishers, will find it difficult to produce something meaningful while watching the clock. If the text is particularly technical or is entirely new content, severely limiting the time dedicated to the task will undoubtedly have an impact on the quality of the output.
Link Building
As with content, preparation is everything when it comes to building good quality links. There are so many factors to take into account and work to do behind the scenes that thirty minutes per every twenty-four hours suddenly looks like a drop in the ocean. You must identify the targets – a time consuming prospect within itself –, send off a link request or spend time producing original content worthy of publication on the site and then follow up with the third party page to confirm that the link has been placed and has optimized anchor text. Not all of these tasks can be shoehorned into thirty minutes. Finding relevant sites can take days or even weeks as search results are trawled through and competitor referrers analyzed for suitability.
If you start early though, organize your time and identify your targets precisely, it’s suddenly not such a daunting task. If you accept that not every day will be spent achieving physical links but rather putting the building blocks in place to achieve the link tomorrow or even the next day or the week after, thirty focused minutes spent link building can actually be much more productive than a whole day spent dedicated to the same task.
Social Media
Of all of the elements of search engine optimization, social media is arguably the one that best lends itself to a restricted timetable. In many ways, it’s actually an off shoot of on-page optimization as refreshed website content makes excellent blog fodder and can be used for bookmarking purposes.
By its very nature, social media is a peer to peer forum and a space for businesses and consumers to interact, meaning content is not expected to be lengthy. Sites such as Twitter personify the quick and easy personality of social media, making it easy to update two or even three social media outlets within thirty snatched minutes.
Posted on September 10, 2008
