1. A willingness to learn basic principles

   Clients that are knowledgeable in up-to-date basic SEO principles before seeking expert assistance on a website are rewarded by lower fees. Less time spent educating the client during initial consultation and day-to-day maintenance activities means smaller SEO site budgets! You could also flip the coin, less time covering basics means more resources allocated to advanced topics (eg. localised search, web analytics, linkerati tips & tricks)

2. The ability to trust an authority in their field

   A client prepared to actively consider and action industry expert recommendations are typically rewarded by opportunities to test new techniques and best practices otherwise not mentioned to traditional clients. It’s the same across the board, if you go out of your way to please your partner they will go the extra mile in effort for you.

3. Be receptive and reachable

   This is pretty simple, always have someone at your firm to deal with site issues raised by your SEO firm. This may be as simple as providing remote details to the web server or as critical as your web developer’s contact details. If you have planned leave let your SEO agent know and allow for a second in command of your SEO operation.

4. Patience towards long-term performance goals

   There is no formal “SEO optimised” specifications (as yet) so clients should expect to see short-term traffic fluctuations as search engines, visitors and competitors respond to updated site content and presentation. Ensuring a positive trend continues is the goal of sales-focused site optimisation.

The Australian SEO community experienced first hand the effect of Google manually adjusting a websites key term SERP position. The exemplar was Found Agency, and their scrupulous inbound link techniques. The SEO firm were predominantly providing traffic counters on sites to generate inbound links in turn increasing organic rankings for leading SEO industry terms.

This has sparked my current delimma.

What is the consequence of having client sites with “Build by [company]”, “Created by [company]” buttons linking back to web development firms?

To help answer this I spoke to members of #seo on Efnet over IRC. Below is an extract of my conversation with HM2K.

<illumini> as a web development company is it SE ethical to place inbound links of your own site on client sites (with their permission)?
<HM2K> yes, however, too many links on the same IP range can appear as a link farm

This is understandable from a spiders point of view, too much good news raises conerns. This may have consequences for web development firms that additionally host clients works on in-house infrastructure.

<illumini> HM2K, so as long as they’re hosted separately it’s not a problem?
<HM2K> technically yes, but sometimes there can be human intervention too

SEO providers and clients need to be aware that they can’t game the engines forever using back-linking practices. In summary, my new understanding of client back-linking is that it’s an accepted industry practice providing little practical benefit to user or clients while benefiting service providers in their own search rankings; a practice Red Block will avoid participating.

I thought it only fair while learning all about Open Search technology that I wrap up and let loose a Page Strength SEO Tool search plugin for Firefox/Internet Explorer users!

I use this tool to measure site ranking metrics on a frequent basis and as I continue to align myself within this field hope to add it to my daily toolkit! Keep close, the list is coming…

- How the content is structuredHumans are impressionable, we are able to take on a very basic visual process to standardise the Internet, we’re not too fussed how a page is presented as long as content is of an appropriate height and style.

Headers are given emphasis, be this a colour or increased font weight - bold - we do this as this is how we are taught early on to read. The Internet is no exception to this media rule. Copyright text is de-emphasised as it is not important. This would also hold for the date of a article or the poster of said article.

In visual presentation of content your unique page title is critical. It needs emphasis in style for human readers and to be wrapped within an H1 tag for robots. The content immediately following the page title is expected to be of more importance than that of content half way down the page. Consider grouping content into related topics beneath the page title, this makes content easy to read and easy for a robot to accurately index.

Micro formats - sets of specific catalogued data - are a great idea rapidly being supported by search engines, consider adding your company address, contact details and other important visitor data in a hCard format, it’s quite a simple exercise.

This collection of SEO articles will boost awareness as well as the satisfaction of your inbound traffic. Looking for more ways to boost your site, comments?