If you don't watch late-nite infomercials, you may not be familiar with the origin of the phrase "set-it and forget-it". Originally it became popular as the marketing slogan for a set of Ronco rotisseries by Ron Popeil that allowed the user to place something to be cooked in the rotisserie, set it and then forget it for easy meal preparation. Some folks in the field of internet marketing have advised that SEO is a set-it and forget-it type of activity that only needs proper setup and then the rest is just a matter of watching your site rise to the top in 2 to 3 months where you will live happily ever after.
Nothing could be further from the truth and the reason is not because search engines are supposedly constantly changing their algorithms. The reason is that SEO is an incremental process that needs a foundation but more importantly requires a feedback loop that is monitored and adjusted on a regular basis. Some experts have even suggested it is a waste of time to monitor search engine rankings because you can't really get accurate measures. Again totally false. An effective and efficient SEO Program needs monitoring of search engine rankings with a feedback loop to tie those results back to indexing and the search engine placement in relation to other sites that are competitive for your keywords.
In addition to monitoring what happened each month, your SEO Program needs to incoporate those findings into your pages with updated keyword research, content development and off/on page linking. If you do not have all of these components as part of your SEO Program integrated into a centralized management dashboard then you will not only trip over your own feet as you make changes to your site without proper justifications but also lose ground each month because you are not collecting the necessary data so critical to make decisions with in the future. As the proper data accumulates, you will be able to make statistically valid conclusions because you now have a large enough data set.
At ACS Group and SEO Panda, we have worked hard over the past 5 years to develop an SEO Program that includes both a proper setup and an on-going process for monitoring and taking action on the results. Borrowing from the best practices developed at our parent company, ACS Group, an IT Consulting company for the past twenty-two years, SEO Panda was founded to close that glaring gap that exists in the marketplace between Advertising agencies that claim to do web development and Web Development companies that claim to do SEO. SEO Panda is the happy medium between understanding and applying the principles of web information architecture and search engine marketing to provide a proven, practical approach to SEO.
