Was there ever a simpler and more controversial topic? Phillip over at Google Blogscoped answered the call of some non-savvy relatives and wrote a generally great primer that nails the three primary directives:

1. Create good content.
2. Make the content accessible.
3. Tell others (hope for links).

His advice is clear, honest, and will produce good to great results for many who today are lost in the dark woods without a flashlight or a map. But then Phillip himself wanders off the trail. After all the good advice he says:

“take a break for a while. And then get back to continue to grow your site. But don’t worry about Google results for the first couple of months, in fact, don’t worry about Google results at all. Your site might not appear in search engines in the beginning, and maybe once it does, your competition will rank higher than you... but these things take time….What you can do, though, after a couple of months, is…”

At which point he gets back to good stuff about checking analytics for keywords and avoiding SEO trickery.

My argument is with the ‘don’t worry about your results, go back to growing your business, in a few months check back if you have time, you’ll win some and you’ll lose some’ stuff. Telling someone who has created a site, has expectations for their online business, and took all the trouble to learn and then optimize, to ‘don’t worry about it’ just isn’t realistic, or good business.

I think at that point he should have told them to immediately get analytics set up and start learning to understand how visitors use their site and where they came from, and pay close attention to new visitors who start coming in from natural search.

Common wisdom is that a) you can’t rush Google and b) results don’t start for a couple of months. Both are dead wrong.

There are things you can do to get a new site or new pages indexed, like turn on Google Sitemaps or get some links. And the more links you get the faster the site or any content is going to get notices. The reaction time for unique keywords like company names is often just a few days – and getting those first links is important and exciting. More importantly, the trickle will start at some point (if everything is going well) and you’ll want to know about it and work to amplify it.

The one other addition I’d make the great opening sections of the post is to explain the idea of keyword selection and covering the diversity of ways different people say the same thing.

Phillip does a great job of recommending and explaining page focus and basic tags, but just behind these concepts a newbie should learn that if some people call your ‘Blue Dog Coat’ a ‘Blue Dog Poncho’ then you’ll want to work that content in or add a separate page for it.

Covering the range of potential keywords for any site could be considered slightly advanced for what he was covering, but in the end it’s a basic point and very important – working in extra phrases could increase traffic by a few or many times – especially if some of the ‘alternate’ phrases are less competitive from an SEO viewpoint.

These suggestions aside, I’ll be bookmarking his post and recommending it.