If there is one thing that really gets to me about SEO, its when you find yourself stuck with a client that you wish you had never taken on in the first place. Their site uses tables for absolutely everything, sometimes even just to add an extra space between words, their navigation is all images with javascript, and their content management system means you can’t change a single thing without having to rebuild the whole site.

If you’ve never had a client quite that bad, consider yourself lucky!

Of course its not always avoidable, sometimes, especially working for a company rather than for yourself, where it is not you who gets to decide what clients to say no to - you get landed with these sites and there is not a lot you can do. In which case my advice to you is to asses how bad it really is, do what you can, and then get out of there.

But for the times when you do have control over whether or not to take on a prospective client, consider the following points:

Do they have a content management system?
If so is it open source, home made, or a company-build ? Open source will always be the easiest to work with, with something like Drupal or Wordpress there is a lot you can do with regards to applying an SEO skin to the site. A company-build content management system is where their web design company built them a content management system specifically for their site, these are usually a lot more difficult to work with, relatively closed, and the company in question are generally very sour about giving you access or permission to change their code.

The worst of the bunch by far though, is the home made content management system - where the client has a freelance web designer who has built them an admin area, and made a complete mess of it. In these cases the web designer will most likely be only to happy to let you into his code and tell you how great it is, but ask him how you are going to implement custom meta information for each specific page, and he will suddenly become very stand-offish. Steer clear!

(Side note - if you must take on a client like this, at least ensure that you have FTP access so that you can hardwire in any changes that you need to)

Does their site use tables, javascript navigation, or frames?
If it does, you may want to forget them altogether. Tables are the least bad, they just make content difficult to crawl - you will need to convert the entire layout to CSS, which will take a fair amount of time.

Javascript navigation is in the middle, search engines can’t follow JS navigation, the easy way around this issue is to replicate the navigation in a set of plain-text base links that search engines can follow.

The worst (unsurprisingly) is frames, which don’t display the full source code, and as such don’t let search engines in, you will definitely have to convert a site like this to CSS and PHP includes, which will take the longest out of all of them.

These types of sites are the ones that keep me awake at night, not out of worry, out of sheer manic frustration. God help you if you have a combination of Frames, Javascript, AND Tables.

Does their server have ISAPI / MOD rewrites enabled?
One of the biggest elements of my initial SEO skin for any site is doing file name changes, and URL rewrites. Now obviously these require 301 redirects, and server rewrite rules. It’s all well and good quoting a client to have this work done, but when you come to upload your .htaccess or httpd.ini file and it nukes the whole site - it gets pretty painful pretty fast. Check this beforehand.

Do they need SEO?
I have a real problem with doing SEO for clients that don’t need it. A cabbage farm for example, DOESNT need SEO. They are the wholesaler, they sell to the retailer, and the retailer sells to the consumer. The consumer uses a search engine to find the retailer, but the retailer does not use a search engine to find the wholesaler! That’s just one example, but if your client’s product or services aren’t directly available to the public, then why do they need to rank in search engines?

You may be thinking, ‘well why not?’ and that is a fair question, I would like to say something fitting like ‘to preserve the integrity of Google’s search listings and maintain the ongoing quality of search results provided the general public’… but I won’t. Its simply because everyone without exception, wants SEO, because they want traffic, and if they are paying you for SEO, they expect to see traffic. But number 1 for ‘cabbage farm’ will still yield no traffic because no one is searching for it, so the client gets frustrated, and you get frustrated. Save yourself the headaches.

Do they care?
Some clients are a dream come true, you tell them that SEO is an ongoing process and it requires a lot of their input, and they step up to the plate and get everything done that you ask them to. Others, can be downright rude, refusing to co-operate with any of your requests, and expecting to see results without them having to lift a finger.

Make sure your client understands what is required of them BEFORE taking them on, if they are not willing to do any updates then there is no point in selling them a blog! You may again think ‘why not’ and the reason is the same, when they don’t see results (due to no fault of your own) they will ask where all that money went that they gave you. Save yourself the aggravation, and set up the blogs for clients that will actively use them.

Finally…
I should make it clear that I am not advocating that you ‘duck out’ of any projects that seem like they might be more difficult than others. I am simply saying that you should asses the above points before taking on a client, or you may find yourself putting in many more hours than you had intended, or been paid for. Having sites that are near impossible to optimise isn’t just ineffective for your client’s business, it affects your reputation to. So play on your strengths!

Had any nightmare client sites of your own? Got any questions? Drop me a line in the comments!

In a recent post I gave you a basic introduction to Google Page Rank, and how it works. Today we’ll examine the PR penalty system more closely with regards to what sites you link to, more specifically talking about one tool that I discovered through a recent post on SEOLand.

Google Page Rank is a very clever creature, it works on numerous algorithms that Google are happy to tell you about - provided you sign a contract agreeing to your instant death thereafter. A proposition that many webmasters tearing their hair out have probably considered quite seriously.
Page rank has the ability to make or break a site, good PR and it can give your indexed pages that extra bump they need to get into the top 5, and the maximum click through rate, while having poor PR can ensure that your competitors overtake you that bit more easily, and bump you down to page two; where the number of click throughs you’re likely to get is akin to the number of bikini clad supermodels you’re likely to get at the north pole.
That said however, PR is not the be all and end all of SEO, there is absolutely no point in focusing all your efforts on link building and PR campaigns if your meta content has not been optimised, or your site lacks decent content. Like anything else in the SEO world.. its just another one of the many bricks you need to lay to build your website big and strong.

From the previous article, we’ve established the basics of how page rank works, and as such I’m sure you can draw your own conclusions about how you can improve your page rank. Today, we look at how to avoid the penalties that we looked at in the last article too.

As mentioned, your PR is affected negatively if you are linking to sites of poor quality. This is not the only thing that it is affected by, but when it comes to PR penalties this is the most prominent cause.

The problem comes if you have a relatively big website, perhaps even a link directory - it becomes difficult to keep track of, and remember all the sites you link to, and check them on an ongoing basis to ensure that they are still of high quality and they haven’t slipped at all. Of course, there are dedicated content management systems that will take care of all your links and scan for reciprocal links back to you, page rank, and various other elements.. but these dedicated software solutions cost top dollar, and aren’t a generally suitable solution for the average webmaster.

Thankfully, there is a free alternative, which I discovered through SEOLand - ‘what is this free madness you speak of?!’ i hear you cry.

Read on.

The Bad-Neighborhood tool is a stunning little web application developed to solve the problem of keeping track of your outbound links. Essentially what the tool does, is scan your site for outbound links, then, when it finds them, it scans all those sites for dubious content, further outbound links, blatant spam, and keyword stuffing.

If it finds any of the elements listed above, it alerts you to where they are located, and where the link to that page is located. This way you can not only tell if you’re linking to poor quality sites, you can also tell if the sites you are linking to are linking to poor quality sites.

The results look like this

As you can see I’ve linked to flickr for one of my images (under the creative commons license) and because that page has a high density of hyperlinks in the page copy it has been marked as blog spam. You have to bare in mind that this tool uses relatively simple programming for analysing these pages, so of course it will sometimes flag up things as spam that aren’t. Use your common sense and you’ll be fine.

I find this tool an absolute joy to use, if you notice a drop in PR (in my experience) 9 times out of 10 it has something to do with one of the sites you link to, and this little tool highlights problems quickly and easily.

It should be noted however that while the tool produces good results, it does not go very deep into the site, so you may want to run the scan on you root domain, your blog, and large subcategories, etc.

Have you got a better tool? What do you think of this one?

Drop me a line in the comments!

Managing client expectations with regards to Internet Marketing can be a rewarding experience, but more often than not its a painful up hill crawl to get them to see that, what they want, and what they need, are two entirely different things.

Most often, this comes in the form of what key phrases clients want to rank for, one of my clients for example is dead set on ranking for ‘designer clothing’ - which, as prestigious as it may be, doesn’t really benefit him or his business at all. Why, you ask?

Read on.

A few months ago, said client called me up because he had dropped from the number 2 spot to number 3 in Google (for ‘designer clothing’). He was, and I quote “very concerned about the ongoing success of his Seo campaign due to the significant recent drop”. Ironically of course, the opposite was true, while he had dropped one place for ‘designer clothing’ he was actualy up 36 positions overall from the previous month, and most of the gains were in longer (3 to 5) word terms. What I explained to him, is something that all Internet Marketing clients should ready have explained to them before they are taken on.

Short key phrases (for the most part) do not convert into sales.

While it makes you look pretty big and impressive to rank for ‘designer clothing’ - when it comes down to it if someone is actually doing a search with the intent to buy, they will be much more specific about what they search for.

In this case, ‘buy mens bench jeans’ was converting at an awesome 15%, while comparatively ‘designer clothing’ although drawing a reasonable amount of traffic, was converting at less than 1%. Of course sometimes 1% of a lot of traffic is still more money than 15% of very little traffic, but you have to weigh up the pros and cons. Spend all your time trying to rank for one high traffic, poorly converting term? Or spread your time over 10 lower traffic terms converting excellently?

My personal preference is always the second option.

So how does this relate to managing client expectations? Well often a client will have an idea in their head of what will make them more money online, and they expect you to do all the work and make it happen. This is of course so ridiculous that most of us don’t even take it into consideration.

In reality however, clients need a detailed explanation of what they need, and how this ties in with their own ideas. They also need it to be made clear that there is only so much you can do, this their business, and they need to promote it.

I don’t even know where to start with this one, Google is an absolute beast, and certainly not something that I take lightly when writing about ‘how it works’. Google Page Rank is relatively new in the world of search engines and is a very interesting addition the wealth of factors that decide where a site gets ranked.

Page Rank operates on a scale of 0 – 10 and is basically an indicator of the ‘importance’ of your site in Google’s eyes. The next immediate questions, obviously, are how do you know what your page rank is, and how does Google determine whether or not your site is important?

Read on.

To find out what your page rank is (and everyone else’s) simply download the Google Toolbar for FireFox, or explore any other of the FireFox plugins that will do the same thing.

Your Page Rank is determined by a number of factors, the first and (to an extent) the most important of which, how many sites link to you. So, ebay, facebook, and myspace all have a pagerank of 7-9 because literally hundreds of thousands of sites link to them. A small (or new) site will likely only have a PR1 or 2, because it has not yet established many inbound links. Your ‘link popularity’ as discussed in my previous post about SEO Stat Packages, will give you a number, for how many sites are linking to you, and give you a comparison of other sites similar to yours and how you rank amongst them in terms of inbound links.

Now so far this sounds pretty basic, more links = more page rank, but it goes much deaper than just that little equation.

Page rank is passed on from site to site, so for example site1.com links to site2.com which links to site3.com

Site1.com has a PR7, so Google knows that this is an important site, because site1.com links to site2.com Google thinks site2.com is important too (ebay wouldn’t just link to any old little website, it links to other important sites like bbc and .gov websites). So if a PR7 site links to anther site, it passes on some of its PR. So site2.com which would ordinarily be a PR3 is boosted up to a PR5. Site2.com links to site3.com and puts it at a PR3.

But, if site2.com turns out to be a hacker/spammer website, using poor SEO techniques and Google finds out then it implements a penalty. Site2.com is marked as a dodgy site, and its PR is pretty much shot, but the buck doesn’t stop here, it affects the whole network. Site1.com is a big important site, and its linking to a bad site, this looks very bad, so it’s PR is also penalised and it drops to PR6. Similarly site3.com is no longer getting an inbound link from an important site, because as it turn out, site2.com is not an important site at all, so it no longer receives any PR benefit from site2.com and drops back down to a PR2 – but it is not penalised any further because it has not done anything wrong.

Obviously people have tried to cheat this system, building up high PR sites and then selling links to benefit other people’s PR, but as of December 2007 Google have penalised pretty much every paid directory out there.

It used to be the case that your home page was considered your primary source of PR, and generally PR would drop by one for each subdirectory/subcategory of the site, nowadays however, page rank is assigned very much on a page by page basis, and its not uncommon for a single page of a site to have higher PR than the root index.

Page Rank is updated sporadically, so don’t expect to see it change on a daily or even weekly basis – generally there are PR updates that happen every few months, but even then it can be questionable as to how many sites actually get an update.

Page Rank is a tricky beaver, but you definitely should not focus too much on it, many people try too hard to get a higher Page Rank, when in reality it isn’t affecting their rankings that much. PR is supposed to be a natural thing, thats how it was designed, so if you focus making the site as good as it can be, then people will naturally link to it, and you will see the benefits in your own PR.

What experience have you had with PR? Have I missed something major? Drop me a line in the comments!