Complete SEO Newbie - Advice Please

Hi Guys (& gals),

I have a semi-hypothetical question here, and was hoping someone might help. I am a complete SEO newbie and not a "techie" in any way shape or form, so your advice would be most appreciated.

I have found what I think is an excellent company to help me with my SEO, they certainly come with very good reccomendations and an excellent track record, but I would like to throw this out to other experts.

Ok these are the circumstances:

Newish site - been up about 4 months
Currently very little content
No SEO done at all up til now
Our main keyword has been described as "moderately competative"

Lets assume the SEO company in question is very good at what they do. At the moment the site has very little content but we will be working with the SEO company to a) Produce a steady stream of great content which has been optimised. b) Link build c) Make any other site changes neccessary.

With this in mind how long should it take (approximately) to gain page 1 google results?.

I understand this may be a "how long is piece of string" question, but I am trying to gauge if I should expect page 1 results in a matter of 3-months, 6-months, 2 years etc etc etc.

I guess we will almost be starting from scratch. I just really wanted some indication of the approximate time-frames I should expect working on the assumption that everything is being done right.

Many thanks for any help

There are programs that "crawl" through a webpage to catalog and "rank" pages. That's all they do 24/7/365. Because of the sheer volume of pages they need to go through, it can take anywhere from 3 months to 6 months to begin to see changes (e.g. "page ranking") in SEO. By one year, you should certainly see the complete results of your labor.

There are "tricks" to getting your page reviewed more often--such as submitting your page to be in the DMOZ. However, getting in the DMOZ can sometimes take quite a while and can actually "hurt" you if not done properly.

I am not sure there are some standards here, though definitely, there are some factors that influence the speed of your website ascension. Here are some, for instance:
1. Google Sandbox. Getting a large number of links at once can lead Google to put your site into the sandbox, artificially lowering the rank.
2. How often search engine spiders visit your site and how many pages they can crawl. Ensure you have no broken links!
3. The age of the domain and its history.
etc.

I would say 6 months or so and it does not depend on the quality of SEO very much, I think.