SEO does not “run itself”

I hear this a lot.  Clients or friends will tell me “Well once you set the SEO up then it runs itself”.  Umm, no it doesn’t.  SEO is not a one time thing and often times you can put more work into it months down the line than what you do at the beginning.   There are many aspects of SEO:

• Constantly monitoring traffic – there are so many ways to look at traffic to your site and there are also so many different things you can do to a website that affect this, almost immediately.
• Constantly monitoring your competition – a true competitor will be adapting their tactics to yours.  The moment you thing they are sitting still and letting things “run themselves” then you will get beat in the rankings
• Changing with the market – there are many things that can affect how people search and what they are searching for.  Things like the economy, news reports, consumer fears, and momentum.  You have have to stay on top of these trends.
• dead language – pay attention to how people talk from month to month, this impacts the searches.

Proper SEO will not run itself.  The determining factor in your ranking is often the number of quality links and these aren’t going to magically appear.