Question: How often does Google change their algorithms?

Answer: The first one know one really knows other than Google but experts in the SEO space like SlickRockWeb try to monitor changes to their clients rankings and then sort of backward engineer what the change was. The major changes seem to happen every 6-12 months and occasionally there are minor tweaks in between. This is why occasional monitoring is so important and someone who is serious about maintaining a good rank needs an expert like SlickRockWeb to stay on top of these algorithm changes so that the necessary coding changes can be made. There are a few experts who are former consultants or employees of Google and so they still have contacts within the company and occasionally they will leak out pieces of information about the new algorithm changes. Google keeps a pretty good lid on what they are doing though so it is usually the SEO community pooling their knowledge together to come up with a guessestimate about what the changes were.

Question: How long does it take an SEO campaign to begin to pay off?

Answer: For an SEO campaign to start paying off we advise our clients that within 6 months they will see increases from the search engines. Depending on the degree of optimization needed most of our clients see a 2-3 fold increase in traffic to their site from the search engines within a year. Of course pay-per-click advertising (which is sometimes mistakenly equated to SEM) is immediate. A good SEM strategy is to use a combination of SEO and pay-per-click advertising.

Kind regards,

SlickRockWeb Inc. a leading provider of affordable SEO services - "Bringing you business one click at a time."