There was a time, a couple of years back (pre. "Florida") when getting a site to a good position in Google was relatively straightforward if you knew what you were doing. Now of course its a whole lot harder!

Recent experience suggests that it can take a good six months or more to get a site "there or thereabouts" even with decent on and off-site SEO techniques.

I have access to a network of high ranking medically biased sites and decided to leverage on this by building a site (admittedly for adsense) in the same niche. This was on a new domain, with a raft of exclusive content researched and hand written and then optimised for key search phrases which I knew were popular within the niche. The site itself was css based and with (I think!) some decent metas, heading tags etc and published to a server on a completely different IP range to those from which I intended to link.

Next I added in a number of links using broadly similar anchor text from a bunch of highly ranked sites (PR4, 5 and the odd 6) - this was staggered over several weeks to try and simulate "organic" link building. I sat back and waited…. and waited….. and waited. For the first 2 or 3 months the site languished in the lower reaches of the rankings, earning very little. I then wrote a couple of comprehensive articles and submitted these to several article sites to try and boost back links. The articles proved quite popular and were picked up by a number of sites (complete with the valuable back-links). Gradually the ranking position started to improve.

Seven months on and the site is now where I hoped it would be when I first published - high page one for a number of chosen key phrases within several of the site pages. Earnings are also approaching what I had originally hoped for. But what hard work!!

I was targetting some fairly generic search phrases but I did have the advantage of access to lots of relevant back-links. Even so it has taken well over 6 months to achieve good ranking. I'm going through a similar process with another site at the moment and its following pretty much the same pattern - "slooooow burn" despite a bunch of good quality back-links.

These days its a long haul with Google, even when you are playing with a decent hand. Any similar experiences?

Dave J