How many times do you have to tell someone something before they finally listen and do as you tell them? The answer to that question is not so simple...
...I have a son, he's 1 years old and when we want to stop him doing something we have to tell him at least three times to stop doing something before he'll stop. The good news for us though is that after the third time he "really gets it" and stops doing it.
As kids get older though the number of times that you have to tell them to stop doing something depends on how much they love doing it and how rewarding the process is. For example, if someone is building lots of links to their sites and getting high rankings short term then telling them to stop doing it just once isn't going to work.
In fact telling them to stop doing it is probably not going to work at all. The reason being that they're being rewarded with rankings, although we all know it's only short lived.
So the answer to the question, how many times do you have to tell someone something before they finally listen is complicated. That's why this post is written with a little bit of frustration and even a tinge of anger. You see, for years now I've been saying that the only way to really rank well on a search engine is to produce quality content that readers want to read, share, like and tweet about.
If your readers are doing this, if they are actually ENGAGING with your content then your long term SEO effects will be HUGE. But if you're reading this you probably already know this. So the question is why, if we know this, do we not do it?
Why Do We Take The Easy Way Out?
It's simple. As humans we are trained to want instant results and content based SEO does not get instant results. It takes time to show up but once it does it stays. The question you need to ask yourself is are you willing and able to stay the course? Are you able to invest in your SEO in such a way that you will forgo the quick return for the long term result?
I can tell you if you do, if you finally embrace that content is king, and is the only way to produce great SEO results in a predictable long term fashion then you'll finally be done with the SEO yoyo.
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