SEO Timescale

This is something I get asked more and more these days. It's a bit like asking, "How long after I record my first single will it take for me to get famous?".
I can't tell you, I don't know(!) - any more than I know if or when you'll be on the front page of Google for your preferred search term! When you come to me with an existing site, I can start to maximise your investment in that site by giving it on-page optimisation. Once I've done what I can to see that it conforms to a basic SEO template concept, the next step is to effect an internal linking strategy. Both these strategies will improve your ranking but by how much is dependent upon multiple external factors over which I have absolutely no control. For instance, the amount and quality of the SEO competition might be easy to compete against or it might be very hard. It might stay as it is, in either case, or it may veer from one to the other in a matter of days or weeks. All I can do is work to sound principles and recommend that they are observed and built upon after I've done my work. Even then I can only say what follows will probably be better than if those principles had not been followed.

If you have both time and money, then you can submit to pay-for-inclusion directories. If you have nothing but time (after writing your related content, of course) then you may seek out specialist directories and sites thematically related to yours and request and/or exchange links from/with them. I give details of how to do this on my page about link popularity. You can also help yourself along by making sure your pages validate. An engine can have a great deal more confidence in the content of a properly validated page and can offer it in return for a related search query with more confidence than it can a page which consists largely of "tag soup".
So, it will pay you to give it code that validates. Text that is spelled correctly and is at least approximately grammatical. And lots of it.