SEO Timeline – How Long Does it Take to Get on Page 1 of Google
While it is not possible to give exact time frames for your web site, it is possible to give you some rough estimates. I am using Google here, but it is equally true for Bing and Yahoo.
photo credit: stefanopa
A few days to 1 Month
Google discovers your site and starts to index a handful pages. If your page can not be found in Google after a month, you must have committed some serious blunders.
2 to 3 Months
In the first few months Google starts to index your web site. Not all pages are indexed yet. Google determines a crawl schedule. It is very important that you add fresh, unique content at least on a weekly basis and add backlinks from relevant pages. Depending on your niche and on your efforts, the PageRank should be between 0 and 4 by now. Yes, it is true, PR4 is possible after 3 months.
6 Months
By the end of the 6th months, all your pages should be indexed completely and Google digests your backlinks to determine your ranking. Some of your keywords start to nip from the first page. You should continue to add relevant backlinks and unique content on a regular basis. The Pagerank can improve slightly.
12 – 24 Months
Now you should see a marked increase in traffic, as well as a much improved PageRank and some stable ranks for your keywords. A PageRank of 5 to 6 is possible now. If you are doing at least some things right, Google should trust your site now. But careful: don’t stop the engines now or your site will crash badly.
Another thing: Don’t expect to get a page one listing for any meaningful keyword by “investing” a couple hundred dollars. Ain’t gonna happen! For any industry you will find some guys with very deep pockets. That means you are competing against real SEO budgets.
Brilliantly time-lined the SEO life process. Most of us forget that patience is the key especially with SEO’ing ones website. Too many links in too short time is a real blunder, but again nobody can draw the line between too many and average
When it comes to optimizing one should take immense care and track the entire campaign proceedings and review it periodically. Only then we can identify whether we are on the right track or not. According to me the “2-3 Months” time zone is the most crucial part than any. If done wrongly everything will go for toss. Another important factor is the level of competitiveness we deal with. A highly competitive search phrase definitely takes more time than normal ones. If you are the only meat vendor in Chicago, you can easily gain top position 
This is a great explanation of what most people can expect with their websites, although there are always exceptions. Some people set up a website and after 4 or 5 months of not making money or not getting that much traffic they simply quit instead of waiting out the process. It definitely does take some time to start seeing some real revenue from sites until they start showing up higher in the search engines.
I’ve been looking for something like this. I understand, of course, that many factors come into play, and there’s no one size fits all schedule for all blogs or sites. But it’s still quite helpful to read about what typically happens, based on other people’s experiences with their sites. It can be rather discouraging when there doesn’t seem to be much progress taking place, even after working on a site for several months, so it helps to know that, in the general course of things, months do have to pass in order for a site to eventually move up the rankings.
I think it really depends as to how competitive your keywords are. If you spot a trend that no one else does, the benefits of SEO can be a lot more rapid. I don’t think Pagerank is a very good indicator for anything – Google seem to be completing major updates on Pagerank a lot less frequently than they used to.
What Rick said is true. I playfully made a website using an extremely niche (but still has demand) keyword last week. It’s #10 in Google now without much work. In comparison, I’ve been doing SEO on another site since late last year and I only got to the top 10 last week.