When people decide to optimise their site for search engines they are often impatient to rush in and get instant results.

While this is understandable it is not necessarily the best approach.

The problem is that if you do everything at once, you will find it difficult to know what is working and what is not and this could mean you waste a lot of time and money in the long run.

Let me explain a little further.

These days most people know the basics of SEO. It primarily consists of having lots of good, keyword rich content on your site and then ensuring that you have lots of inbound links from other websites.

Armed with this knowledge, you might lock yourself away in a room for several days and write lots of great content. You add keyword rich alt text to your images and create lots of videos with links from YouTube and so on.

You upload all this to your website and then without even pausing for breath you start submitting your details to hundreds of online directories to boost your number of inbound links. You may even pay for some links as well as submitting articles to directories and contributing to blogs.

After two or three weeks of frenzied activity you find yourself constantly checking your keywords in the search engines to see how you are doing.

Let’s be positive and suppose that you have had an acceptable improvement in your rankings and you want to go on to do more.

That may sound good but consider the implications. You’ve achieved this improvement by a sudden rush of activity. You’re unlikely to be able to keep that up so from now on you may have to work a little smarter, but how will you know what areas to concentrate on?

By doing everything at once you don’t really know what worked for you and what didn’t. Was the sudden improvement down to content? If so, which piece of content? Or was the improvement down to the links? If so, which links?

You won’t be able to answer these questions but you would have been able to if you had taken a more measured approach.

For example, if you added links more gradually and then waited a few weeks for the search engines to register them you would have a good idea of how important they were in improving your ranking.

Over a period of three to six months you would be able to assess the value of links from different article directories, blog sites etc. You would then be able to go back to those sites to get more good links.

This way you would know how to target your SEO more intelligently.

It may take a little longer but it will increase your chances of success because you’ll be able to focus on the links and content that work best for you.