Most people tend to think of good SEO as something you just do every once in a while and things somehow work themselves out (like cleaning your room when you were a teenager). Sadly, it’s not that simple. Good SEO is a continuous process that should be an integral part of your website from the beginning. The quality perpetuation of this continuous process will lead to favorable results while performing a few SEO operations before you launch your website will end in deep frustration.
Why is that? Back in the day Google didn’t penalize synthetic text and black hat tactics as hard as they do now, which is why you could afford to slap a few optimized pages on your site and it was all fine because it was easy to lie to the crawlers. The old Google was like a working mother who didn’t have the time to check if her offspring had really cleaned their room – she would just open the door, see that things seemed in order and leave for the office. She couldn’t check under the bed and realize that it looks worse than a dumpster. You managed to avoid cleaning your room with diligence. Congratulations!
But things are a bit different today. Our single mother has much improved since then and is now running a home business, which means a lot more time for her to check out your room. You can no longer get away with throwing your trash under the bed. Now you simply have to keep your room neat and clean or you will be grounded. It makes things a lot harder, but hey – it’s not like Google doesn’t reward you for your hard work. The better you clean your room, the better allowance you get.
This is how things work now. The search engines are evolving and you need to evolve with them if you want to stand a chance against your competition. So realize that good SEO is a continuous process and that it’s important to begin it early in your website’s development.