Our SEO myth-busting blog posts are proving very popular, so we're going to carry on doing our best to make the art of SEO (search engine optimisation) as transparent and easy to understand as possible.
Today's myth is the one that suggests that SEO is a magic wand that can have an instant effect on your search engine rankings, the number of visits you get to your website, and the number of enquiries you receive.
It would be wonderful if it worked like this, but sadly it doesn't. SEO is a complex subject. Firstly, you have to know how to do it, and make sure you do it properly. On the assumption that you've done that, you then have to wait, often for several months, for the results to start to show. In other words, it's likely to be several months before your site starts appearing higher on search engine rankings.
Search engines find out about your site and the content by crawling it. They then index the results, so they are ready to be searched. There are billions of web pages in existence, with thousands more being added each day, so understandably this process takes time.
Google says: "Crawling and indexing are processes which can take some time and which rely on many factors. In general, we cannot make predictions or guarantees about when or if your URLs will be crawled or indexed. In general, the most common reason that a site is not indexed is because it's just too new -- be patient!"
