Seven Excellent Things Great SEO Clients Do

SEO

Written by Randy Comeau on Thursday, 10 June 2010 10:07

Seven Excellent Things Great SEO Clients Do

What?  You mean there is such a thing as a bad client?  No way!  Of course this statement is complete sarcasm.  The truth of it as we all know there is a good client and a bad client.  A good client when talking about SEO is one that educates themselves to know what the SEO needs.  Often times the client involvement can make or break a campaign.  A passive client will often wonder what is going on when nothing is happening.  The SEO can only know as much as the client gives him/her. 
Here are Seven items that a good SEO client does:

1.    Get Involved

A client that gets involved in their SEO campaign will help the SEO professional know and understand what key terms and phrases to utilize to leverage a long-term strategy.  A lot of the time the SEO is left on an island to fend for themselves, this is not the best strategy to employ.  The client must remain in communication and help the SEO leverage the best terms and phrases for their business.   Nobody knows the business better than the owner or someone able to manage and thus the owner or manager should be helping to leverage the highest results.

A client who is not involved in the decision making process is really nothing more than a pay cheque to the SEO.  Great SEO clients help and assist the SEO in their directions. 

2.    Trust your SEO

If you are certain that the SEO you hired is a professional and you’ve done your due diligence you should certainly trust what the SEO has to say.  They are the professionals.  Taking the SEO professional’s advice will often lead to higher returns for you.  If you try to sound like you know what you are talking about and the SEO does what you tell them you will only hurt your own bottom line.  When you sign into an SEO contract you are not simply signing into a service, you are signing into a business relationship that must be upheld on both ends.  Be sure you are aware of what the SEO is capable of and willing to do within’ a scope of work contract.

3.    Asking for Advice

If you are doing anything with your website, you should ask your SEO for advice on any modifications or changes that you plan to make.  See how those changes will affect the work of the SEO.  If you are not sure about something on your website ask your SEO about how it will affect the work completed.  If changes are made without consulting the SEO first you could be completely wiping out the SEO’s work and again, this will hurt your bottom line.  As a client you need to be sure that the changes you want to make will not have long-term negative results.  A good SEO client will seek the SEO’s advice before doing any form of modification to their website, weather is be minor or major.

4.    Question Recommendations

If your SEO is making a certain recommendation by all means ask why, understand why the SEO wants to make certain changes or do something a certain way.  There is usually a logical and beneficial reason to doing something a certain way.  Understanding the process and how to move ahead the most efficiently will only benefit everyone!

5.    Implementing Recommendations

After questioning and understanding it is up to the client to make sure any changes and modifications to an SEO campaign are completed.  There are times that direction is lost in translation and although the SEO wrote it down comprehended the changes/modifications or suggestions in a completely different manner.  Clients that leave long lists sitting uncompleted or completed incorrectly as to their specifications have to business complaining about SEO performance in a campaign.

6.    Measure Results

It is not the SEO’s job to sell.  It is the SEO’s job to bring targeted traffic to your website.  The website should be sufficient enough with content to sell for you.  The SEO can bring thousands of people to the doorstep but if the content on the site is not sufficient the conversion cannot happen.  If an SEO campaign is not working the first place to look is at the content of the site.  Perhaps it is too complicated or perhaps the path to get to conversion is too long.  The SEO can help you understand the process of this.  As a client you need to be aware that #1 position does not always relate to conversions either.

7.    Pay on Time

Don’t really need to go into this one, but the nuts and bolts of it are that we all run businesses and everyone wants their customers to pay on time.  The SEO is there to help your business succeed and they cannot do that if they are not getting paid on time.

No SEO or client wants a campaign to fail.  There are circumstances where the client insists on certain items being completed a certain way and they do not take the SEO’s advice and in this way the client ends up getting in their own way to success.  As long as the client will listen to the SEO and their professional opinion, in most cases this will result in results that will relate back to ROI.

Online or Internet Privacy. Important or not, that is the question.

SEO

Written by Randy Comeau on Friday, 28 May 2010 09:42

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Online or Internet Privacy.  Important or not?

The recent buzz over the past several months has been all about Privacy Policies and settings on the ever popular Social Network called Facebook.  The largest social network world wide has changed and re-changed their policies several times, each time trying to rectify more privacy issues.  This has happened again within that past 48 hours of this article and users, yet again, now have to find out what is safe on their profile and what is not.

The biggest concern on the internet is of course “is my information safe”.  The answer is yes and no.  The internet is the world’s largest collection of information and social connections anywhere.  There are all types using it.  There are professors, lawyers, Wal-mart greeters, teens, politicians and yes, of course, criminals.  It is the last one named you need to be concerned about.  There are people trying to collect your vital information to take advantage of you, but they can only get this information if you give it to them in some form.

So what can you do to stop this invasion of your online privacy?  Simple.  Make sure you know what you are signing up for and what you are posting to various blogs, forums, directories and of course social networks.  Giving up vital information such as your address and phone number in some cases may be all the predator needs to look up more information about you.  Keep this information private or only share it with your friends.

We all hear the stories every day of how someone cleaned out a bank account when someone fell into one of the many email bank fraud scams sent via email.  Just deal with what you know is safe, secure and above all else deal direct with banks you know.  When you get an email from a bank or other financial institution asking you to change your password, never click the link.  Navigate directly via your web browser.  These scammers can fake the web address very easily through email.  They will often setup a dummy web page to collect your data once you enter your account information and password, that’s it, you’re done.  So beware.  Play it safe.  Think smart.

Now, it isn’t just individuals that are affected by this, it is also businesses.  Of course businesses want to get noticed in as many places as possible, but the same warnings apply.  You put your information out there and people can gather it and use it against you.  So be sure where you place your contact info and what contact info you post is something that you are comfortable with people tracking down.  Posting information like what bank you are with or any sensitive information such as social security numbers or social insurance numbers (depending what country you are from) is always a huge, astounding NO!

To sum everything up, the nuts and bolts of internet security is to keep your private information private, think smart about where you are posting and what information you are sharing with the public.  Never share or click links asking you for passwords.  Keep that on the top of your mind and you can live a long and happy life on the internet.

Why does your website rank low? How can you increase your online visibility?

SEO

Written by Randy Comeau on Wednesday, 19 May 2010 13:03

In the world of the internet you need to be highly visible in every possible location you can think of.  The key to attaining this is hard work, common sense, science and art.  Okay, so now your confused, PERFECT!!!

Hard Work

When trying to get top ranks in the search engines it is not easy.  Using hard work you can attain your goals.  Simply doing the work one day and then leaving it will not do it for you.  Keeping your rank up is a constant effort, several hours per week.  Keep to it and you will see results.  It takes several months for your efforts to really start making a difference.  Giving up in the short term will just yield poor results.

Common Sense

When you are putting your campaign together you need to really think about who your audience is.  Pick terms and phrases that they will ultimately search for.  If you use acronyms you can expect lower results but more accurate in most cases.  There are of course some instances that will also yield completely irrelevant results, so be sure to test your terms out.  Think about the places you decide to place links, do they seem like high quality websites.  You can easily verify this by checking Google’s PR checker for that page.  The reason for this is you want to be associated with high ranking pages, this will help your overall online presence and search engine positions.

Science

Looking at every angle, every statistic and analyzing the results.  You need to look at all this.  By looking at the details you are then able to make changes to pages and titles and tags as well as content to leverage even better results in the search engines.  Having the analytical expertise will greatly help you attain favorable results.

Art

Getting the correct Title tags and descriptions for your page is vitally important.  Getting it right the first time is an art.  Being able to see the key terms and phrases in the content and lining up the title and descriptions with that is the secret ingredient.  This is not something that everyone can pick up on, it is ultimately discerned by the eye of the person looking at the page.

When you look at your page and you can’t figure out why your page is ranking poorly, remember these four areas that you should be checking.  It is not easy and it can take time for your work to show up with viable traffic, but in the long run you can do it.  If you simply do not have the time nor the patience to handle a task like this yourself, we, nuMantis encourage you to contact us to handle this for you.

Trust, Expectations and SEO. A Shady Past.

SEO

Written by Randy Comeau on Monday, 26 April 2010 11:20

Trust, Expectations and SEO. A Shady Past Overshadows the Good SEO Professionals… ahem GURUS!

Definition: Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The art of optimizing web pages so they will show up in the ranks of the search engines.

Years ago when SEO first came onto the scene it got a bad rap. Ever since SEO has been overshadowed with this stigma that the art of getting websites ranked and searchable on search engines is somehow some kind of witchcraft or voodoo. The truth of the matter is that it has nothing to do with witches or voodoo, you simply need to be a guru! Get it right people!!!

Alright, all kidding aside, SEO really has dragged this stigma along with it. The art is now questioned, poked and prodded and to be honest, for good reason. There are so many SEO people right now but only a small fraction of them are actually qualified to do SEO. The biggest problem is that technology is constantly changing and the SEO professionals must keep on top of the search engine trends and algorithm changes. Separating the good from the bad is not as hard as one would think. If you are looking for SEO and do not know what to ask or what to do here are a few great questions you should be asking your SEO expert.

1. Do you submit my website to search engines?

• THE CORRECT ANSWER IS: You do not have to submit to search engines anymore. The search engines as long as the tagging on the site is     correct will come to you.

2. How many keywords can I use in my META Keywords tag?

• THE CORRECT ANSWER IS: META keywords are not used anymore by the search engines, this was dismantled years ago, however, if you do put anything in you should keep your keywords/phrases below 10.

3. Do you have statistical data to show me proven results?

• THE CORRECT ANSWER IS: Yes, every SEO should have statistical data to show you based off of other jobs they have completed.

4. What components of a website do the search engines actually currently (2010) look at?

• THE CORRECT ANSWER IS:

a) Title Tags
b) Description
c) URL Structure (url slugs)
d) Content
e) H Tags

When choosing your SEO expert be sure to do your homework on what you want from them. There are so many aspects to SEO that often times the expert does not have enough direction from the client. Understanding all the parts to SEO will certainly help you as a client to determine what exactly you want to do. SEO is multi dimensional in scope so be sure to know what you want before contacting your SEO expert. Here are a few aspects of SEO that you may or may not have been aware of.

On-Site SEO: This is dealing with all the tags on a physical website and making the page viewable by search engines.

Off-Site SEO: This essentially is building links to the website from other sources than your website. This is called link building to some. The SEO expert will need to scour the web for sources to have links that go back to your website. This is very time intensive.

Social Network Marketing: This is quickly becoming something that SEO professionals have to contend with. If you want to be found on the social networks you can expect the SEO person to be able to set this up for you and also manage your social profiles for you, however, it is recommended that you be involved in the social networks as well. So do not expect miracles from the social networks unless you are involved in this process yourself. The SEO professional will never know your business better than you know it.

What to Expect

Expecting SEO to be a magic recipe is a common mistake many have made. For some sites SEO is all they need to get a steady flow of targeted traffic, but this is not the case for every site that has SEO. There are simply some genres that are more popular than others and this will always relate to more traffic and ultimately dollars than others. In most cases you can expect a return on investment through simply the traffic and eyes on your website; however, if you are operating an online store, this is something that must have constant management and promotion. With so many business types and models it is difficult to gauge an exact number for the traffic flow. All that can be said is that the traffic that you leverage through SEO will generate targeted traffic, in, more than likely more quantity. Sales when related to SEO can NOT be guaranteed.