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A Word About Our Clients

Everyone wants the easy way to get to the top of the search results list. Expecting good results and a strong return on investment are natural signs of a good business mind. How to turn a web site into an investment with a return is a little harder to grasp. If you are selling Angus, your primary goal is to promote the heck out of your best animals, expecting your web site to drive up demand and consequently get the pleasure of watching a bidding war go on for those animals when the sale happens. A few sell embryos and artificial insemination services- their end goal is to spur a prospective buyer to action- in this case, to call or otherwise contact the breeder and buy the embryos or A.I. service.

These are hard things to grasp because most of our clients are running a small business and will not see the concrete results of a web site, like a shopping cart where one can purchase products. (Side note: even for the few willing to pay for a shopping cart, it is may not be successful because their users still prefer a person-to-person transaction not a person-to-computer transaction…especially for live animals.)

Why are these things relevant to Search Engine Optimization? Because the reward of Search Engine Optimization is even less apparent. Black hat SEO marketers are useful for one thing- they introduce our clients to the idea and how it relates to their business (even if their end approach to SEO is wrong).

The Short Version on Black Hat Methods

Old techniques included keyword stuffing in Meta tags and white keywords on white backgrounds. It also includes the link farms, where pages were filled with links referring to other (sometimes legitimate) sites, but the other links didn’t add value when compared to the content on the site.

New techniques include spamming blogs in the comments by including a link to their web site and slapping their keywords into the comment post. Similar methods are used with trackbacks.

Weighing the Return on Investment

When our clients call us wanting to know what they can do in order to rank higher in the search engine results, the answers are never what they want to hear. To earn a higher legitimate ranking, it takes work. That means possibly rebuilding the back end of the site, where the main navigation is images instead of live text; fixing the layout by switching from tables to CSS; adding fresh, new and/or more content to the pages; making the site more accessible by giving up the ugly Flash-only intro page; using descriptive links to the other pages.

It all costs money. Determining a budget is where the conversation usually ends. When they go back to the black hat SEO marketing companies, they ask for more money than what our clients originally paid to have the site built. Often it’s double the cost of the original site build. When they ask how much it will cost to use our services for SEO, the worst case scenario is the cost of a complete site rebuild (think of the Gardiner Angus Ranch web site- it was a few thousand dollars). The best case scenario I have had recently was a couple of minor but necessary changes to the site, where the client was only charged the Content Update fee – $35 an hour, with 4 hours of work.

Blowing Smoke- Are we doing it too?

Although we run cattle web sites, although our customers are roughly 10 years behind in adopting web technologies, don’t write us off as irrelevant just yet. In a remarkable twist of fate, a better-known, well-respected company in the Web field has released a much-needed tutorial on SEO. Go ahead. It’s a free tutorial, compliments of Figleaf Software. I’ll wait.

Glad to see you’re back. See what I mean about unpleasant answers? Before even diving into the technical things one can do to improve the SEO on a site, Steve Drucker addresses the business aspect of SEO. What is your end goal? Why do you want SEO? These are the same questions people should be asking themselves when first building a web site, too. If they say, “I want SEO because so-and-so has it.” we have a good indication they don’t know why they think they need it.

Then, getting into the SEO part, he suggests “Fix your site” and “update your content.” How many people really look forward to hearing that? Probably only the folks who have been repeating themselves over and over again- legitimate SEO marketing companies, ad agencies providing SEO as an aspect of their marketing services, web developers and web designers. The important outcome is the acknowledgment from our clients is that SEO is not so easy as first believed. If they still choose to go with an outside company, that’s perfectly acceptable. At least at this stage I can feel relief, knowing they understand how to find quality services and a good company.

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