Someone once said to me ” There is no room for sentiment in business ” they then smiled wryly. Inside I knew this person was fundamentally wrong and perhaps a victim of their own ego. Sentiment  and principles of good business go hand in hand, consideration to others who are struggling in difficult times often brings countless rewards if not for your own feelings of compassion but to your business too.

My point here is this - today competition is sharp and everyone wants to make money but there is also room to help others at the same time.

Would you for example charge a one woman/man business the same price for a 3 page brochure website as you would to do a site for a large corporate?  Think about this, what if the smaller business grew and became bigger than the corporate it’s likely they would remember how you helped them in the first place.

Help others to help yourself then ?

I know we all need to make money but isn’t it more rewarding if you can actually help others in the process ?  So-called business experts will give you different advice.

Dan Horton SEO

Dave had a meeting with a client on Friday which I came in on at the closing stages.
Since starting here one thing I have noticed about Dave is that he likes to explain SEO tactics directly to clients, face to face with a pretty down to earth approach. The client had no online presence and had no experience as to how much value the Internet could give to them or the concepts behind an effective online marketing campaign.

Not for the first time when I walked in the meeting room it was quite clear that the clients looked totally confused by the link building process.

Dave had already gone over the process of obtaining links from quality web sites and establishing authority. He had also fully explained about paid links going through redirects and using the all famous rel= nofollow attribute.

The levels of confusion had started to rise when it was explained that footprints should be eliminated and linking directly to certain sites may well look as if the client were simply paying for links and not be good for the sites ranking in the eyes of search engines who certainly wouldn’t see these links as unbiased.

The meeting went on for another twenty minutes and question that triggered Dave’s exit was “I thought you were supposed to act in the customers interests not just for search engines?”

I ended up trying to explain again what Dave had already gone through in great detail and yet it still seemed the client had been crushed by footprints. It’s not always easy then to explain why we do things in SEO and we can empathise with client’s lack of understanding of processes.

Dan Horton Seo

ok David Brown aka Neo seo on Webmasterradio, has asked me :

and you should let us have you on the show sometime

Ok I thought ,So I jumped over to his seo 101 site and I’m not even in their blogroll, should I do a show or not …

DaveN

Dave has finally let me out from the dark cellar beneath the Bronco building where over the last couple of days I have been looking at ranking reports for clients.
Keywords are of course one of the main focus areas for websites and whilst it’s easy for SEO’s to understand the logistics behind them client’s are not always  certain what all the fuss is about. Anyway, the point I’m getting at is this do we really need to give clients a blow by blow account of their keyword rankings?
Is it not better to show them that their sales have increased and give them true figures on ROI? Perhaps to tell them which products they could target more efficiently? Some SEO companies charge astronomic sums for producing reports which really have very little benefit to anyone. Don’t get me wrong I know how important keywords are for the website to perform.
Don’t you get tired of SEO geeks saying.. We rank no 1 for this we rank no 3 for this we rank no 4 — How about sales? How about the client’s business?

Dan Horton SEO

OK it’s not a term that is familiar to all people believe it or not. SEO - When family ask “What do you do?” - SEO that usually gets a dazed look and wry smile as if the person is on some kind of rare narcotic.

What Should a Client Expect from SEO Services??

More importantly though, what should a customer expect from SEO Services? Recently, I have been looking at a few sites where the clients have asked us to look at their marketing approach and conversion rates to see how effective they have really been and if maybe things could be improved.
It’s surprising then when you encounter pages previously constructed with no titles, insufficient content with keywords mentioned rarely and no Meta descriptions. The call to action is below the fold and in some cases it’s totally unclear where you want the prospect to go on the site.The navigational structure is more muddled than a Russian translator trying to teach Chinese on a runway.

SEO Scandal

Yet this site has had “Search Engine Optimisation” and the client has already paid heftily for this. They are often left confused, thinking that the website would speak for itself and disappointed months down the line that few sales have arrived at their door.

What’s the score here then? Some SEO companies seem to charge the clients a high fee for setting up processes which reap relatively little benefit and effectively waste time leading the client on into spending more and more potential profits.
Initially the client was phased by snazzy PowerPoint displays with graphs charting unlimited success.

This breed of SEO is not one I would choose to follow; OK they can make a fast killing on an unsuspecting client. But what about the long term prospects of their clients business, don’t they care? SHAME ON YOU
Working together you can establish a firm foundation of trust with the client and with them see their business develop and both benefit from your efforts.

SEO Business Plan
Personally I think SEO goes beyond just the technical aspects of getting the site right for the spider, the overall business model needs careful examination to make sure the client reaches their target audience in an effective manner. As with any business a plan is essential and the aim with SEO is to guide the client into making the right decisions for their website.
A very important aspect of this process which is often overlooked is getting the client to understand why certain things have been done to their site; face to face talking seems to work best in this area and definitely not promoting unrealistic expectation levels.

SEO Pride

Another thing to consider is what level of SEO will you work on? Pride comes in here, your planning to charge a one man business the same price as a high flying corporate for building and optimising a website? You want to charge huge prices for a website and think you can just keep adding more and more services on? You refuse to do the work because the job is beneath you? Hmm get over yourself!
There is no one-way approach to SEO as each business model is very different and needs unique attention.

Honesty then is a valued approach and keeping the client informed speaks volumes. Work with each other.

OK..my recent Google news post was somewhat dull, I realized that when being kicked awake from under the office desk this morning.

I was thinking– (I know sometimes this isn’t a regular thing)- where are all the women in SEO? Surely this can’t be just a male dominated profession?

It’s OK this post is not a search for the love of my life, I’m happily married. It is however a search to find all women in SEO..

What got me thinking about this was Dave’s post about recruitment and a comment pointing out a potentially ageist flaw in the post, what I’m saying is the SEO industry must be filled with talented people of both sexes, but I guess it’s not PC to mention that…

Another thing that got me thinking about this was Dave’s meet and greet invite, will it be an all male thing?

Things are kept well in order at the Bronco team by,,,well yes you guessed it Dave’s wife Becky.

Personally, I’m pretty hopeless at organising myself without female intuition, financial management etc etc…

So if you are indeed of the female variety speak up now! Or please name your favourite Woman in SEO.

Dan Horton

ps.. if this post attracts less than 30 comments then you all know no women at all.. ;0)

Like I said at the very start learning the ropes of SEO isn’t that easy. I’m still constantly reading all those search engine blogs and keep gaining quality advice from those around me.

The thing I love about working here is the variation that you get, in other words no one day is the same.

I set a little challenge for myself to target a keyword and see how well I could get it to rank in the SERPS.

Purely experimental and to see what happened:

SEO Yorkshire

Current search results:

SEO Yorkshire

A combination of my rather novice efforts at Web Design Yorkshire and the Internet Marketing blog I started all helped with the process.

Now ranks at position 3,4,5,6 - OK it’s not the most competitive keyword but for me at least it’s a start. Each day you learn something different, at least that’s the aim.

Question is what to do with it now ? Suggestions please.

Dave thinks the whole exercise is somewhat ‘girly’ but recognises the valued learning experience.

Already though i’m finding people with valuable experience are willing to help you more and more and not just keep information to themselves.

Hat tips to a fountain of knowledge for search engine optimisation known as UK Gimp.

Dan Horton

There’s been many blog about how laborious link building can be.
Personally, the essential drilling down of websites to explore their levels of authority and deem if they are a viable linking partner I find interesting.

You could literally spend a lifetime building links and still have a feeling in the back of your mind as to how these links are helping with your sites promotion.

In an age were email spam is rife and your filtered inbox is hotter than the inside of a dragon’s nasal passage what’s the most polite and effective way to obtain links?

I’ve recently had a link request from a guy saying:

” Hi there,
My name is*******, I’m Development Manager for *******(http://www.******) I’ve been digging around a few websites over the past few days and I found your site ****** I’ve had a quick look around and I like what you’re saying. I was wondering if you might consider visiting our site and linking to us. (If you like what you see? Here’s the link: *******)

If you’re interested, it would be really great if you could let me know. If it doesn’t seem like your cup of tea (coffee, herbal beverage) you can just send me an email back with “NO” in the subject line and I won’t harass you again :)

Thanks for your time!

Kind Regards “

Now I kind of like this persons approach, friendly, unique and I’m unlikely to just delete the email.
What do you all consider the best approach for gaining links, well asking for them? How would you go about it?
Dan Horton

check out the search terms Negative Seo, where the fuck is Forbes, it was number 1 at the weekend.

look at Brendan’s Blog he outline the positions on the keyword “Negative Seo”, so what happened.

Did Google really ban Forbes ( again ), if so that’s foul play, but honestly I don’t think it’s a ban.

Google has been rolling out new data, gut feeling they have targeted sites that have the footprints of Link Baiting or a Pseudo Google bowling and buy links the easiest place to buy links is Blogs ! www.johnchow.com example that was banned in google recently. It to early for me to make a judgement call on this, But that forbes article did get a lot of blog links quickly, anyway I will digger deeper. this Data Push has hurt White Hat Sites more than Black Hat site

DaveN

Webmaster Guidelines :
ok lets Look the first part.

When your site is ready:

* Have other relevant sites link to yours.
This is the most important area IMO and also the most dangerous, if you think a quick fix would be to just run out and buy a few 100 links, stop and think about this for a moment. If your link BUYING get seen but Google you will be banned.

So,

Check out Your competitor Links and think of creative ways of a) them swapping the link to yours b) adding your link
but be careful again the site maybe owned by your competitor.

Get your press releases out, and really push your USP.

If you work in an industry that has good authority keep to push some of that authority to your site, recently I saw an Authority Site which allowed it’s members to have a profile page, on one profile page the guy talks about his love of campervans, and links to his personal campervan site, which in turn links to his PhotoCopier website .. hmm a PR8 photocopier site, Thats how you pass authority.

* Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.

Not needed, if you have back links going to your site, Google prefers to find you site than be told about it

* Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google webmaster tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.

Again i’m not happy about this, 2 reasons

a) Google is a link based search engine if you don’t have enough juice to get fully crawled then you need to find more backlinks, giving google a XML sitemap if you PR is low is the quickest way to get into supplemental index

b) You don’t know if Google found that page naturally ( bonus points ) or just because you fed it a autogenerated page of links

* Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
so build a corp blog and ping the blog sites, get press releases out

* Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.
be careful again to many directories links may be a bad signal, and YES YES on Yahoo directory

DaveN