Bad Planning and Lessons Learned

It has been a week and a half since my SEO Venture website, www.snowmanornaments.org, was first indexed by Google.  In an earlier posting I mentioned that my original search ranking was 129. Since then the search ranking has varied between 102 and 154.  I haven't been able to break into the top 100 yet.  Not that being on the ninth page of Google search results is going to drive traffic to my site.  It would be nice, though, to see that some of my efforts are having an effect.  Being a newbie at this, I really don't know how long I need to wait to see results from those efforts.  Maybe I am being too impatient.

In hopes of improving my ranking,  I have made some tweaks to the on page SEO and begun some more off page SEO.  The off page part is proving more difficult than I expected.  It seems there are also fewer 'authoratative' websites out there in my market niche than I expected thus making it harder to get quality backlinks.

Going on the wisdom that the single best thing to drive traffic to a website is original, useful content for users I have added 3 pages of additional content to the site.  Hopefully, Google and the other search engines will crawl it soon and like what is sees.

Unfortunately I am beginning to realize that I should have begun this seasonal niche website at least a month earlier, if not more.  In my ignorance I thought that my website would be indexed faster, that the backlinks I was creating would be discovered faster and that my content was good enough from the start.  I appear to have been wrong on all counts.  I fear that more time will be needed for my website and SEO campaign to 'season' than I have left before Christmas. 

Though there still are 36 days until Christmas, people don't buy ornaments and decorations up to Christmas day.  They want to have acquired them and put them up in advance of Christmas, of course.  So, not having taken this into account, my website really needed to be up to speed 3 or 4 weeks earlier than I originally estimated.  Bad planning on my part.  On the positive side, I've got a really good jump on next year when it will be fully seasoned and ready to go with little work.