The short answer is no, absolutely not – but let me give you a detailed explanation as to why. The mindset that SEO is a onetime process and something you “set and forget” is the worst approach you can take. Correct and effective SEO is a continual process that helps you strengthen and solidify your search engine rankings. Often times I will see a website do everything correct in terms of their SEO practices when they start but then they never touch it again. The problem this approach creates mainly lies with your competition. If you aren’t actively seeking out back links, distributing content, and strengthening your overall web presence you’re creating a vulnerability to be overrun. Any competition you have can come in and do all of the things you have done and then do even MORE, resulting in losing your search engine rankings. If you keep up your SEO efforts and treat it as something you have to maintain the odds of this happening are much slimmer.

After learning about search engine optimization many website owners and new optimizers have an initial “burst” of effort into their on-page and off-page SEO. Many don’t realize that the most effective SEO is an ongoing continual process that you must keep up with month-to-month. There was a time when a little effort would make your website rank high in the search engines (years ago) but that is long gone. With the amount of websites increasing every day and the likelihood of having more and more competition that at least knows the basics of SEO raising just as quickly, you have to give SEO a 100% consistent effort to hit and stay on the front page of the search results.

The best thing to do is to create an ongoing checklist of the same link building and optimization activities to complete every month. Instead of overdoing it in the beginning and trying to build hundreds of links and write lots of articles in your first week of optimization just do a gradual amount that won’t overwhelm you so you’ll actually come back and do it again the following weeks and months. Remember that you always want to make your optimization activities look as natural as possible. If a website goes from 0 backlinks to 2,000 backlinks in a month what do you think a sophisticated search engine algorithm is going to think? You are much better off gradually building links and creating content every week and ramping that amount up as time progresses. This will do 3 things for you: create a systematic checklist of SEO activities, create a solid backlink portfolio, and make your SEO strategy appear as natural as possible.