Thursday, July 31, 2008

SEO and all that Jazz!

The other day I received an email from a previous client that really disturbed me. Now I am really not very thin skinned and have been in this business a long, long time, so I can handle most any situation.

Most of my clients are fabulous – every once in a while there is a client that you try to please, and you go above and beyond the call of duty and they still question what has been done.

This client whom I had built a website for and did make sure her website was search engine optimized – emailed me with a scathing letter on what I had not done for her as far as back end keywords and meta tags etc. It seems that another web person had told her that these things had not been done.


Believe me, we went through and did it, and did it, and did it… IF you know what I mean…

The kicker to this story is she had another very professional person go through this website (right after we built it) with a fine tooth comb and all of these things had been done – according to an independent study (someone other than myself) she even has the report.

Why am I telling you this?

Understanding search engine optimization – is something that is sometimes very challenging. Things do change on a regular basis, for instance in studying the latest from the expert's, Google ignores the meta description tag and instead will automatically generate its own description for your pages.

A lot of people know nothing about this – and depend on experts to tell them what to do. Make sure you know and trust who you talk to. Moreover, things change so what is true today may change tomorrow.

Some experts tell you to only index a few main pages – then you will get a higher ranking – most say to use a site map so the spiders from search engines can index all the links.

So what is a website owner supposed to do?

Even though Google reportedly gets about 85% of the share of searches, there are a lot of search engines that are extremely popular.

Yahoo and MSN are searched by millions. In addition, what about the niche search engines that are particularly important if you are in a niche market??

All of the search engines have slightly different criteria so why not just cover all of your bases?

Do it all - the meta tags, alt tags, and remember the page titles are extremely important.

Most of all remember once your have your website – complete with all SEO criteria – submit them to search engines!!

For a free check list of SEO components go to my website and download it.



To your success.


Pamela Jacob - Artista Design

2 comments:

  1. Hi Pamela...

    I understand your frustration with your client... it happens in my profession as well.

    Sometimes clients are never happy -- I think it is in their nature to always shop around after a service has been delivered and completed. There will always be the client who is never satisfied with what you do -- and they are never satisfied with what anyone does.

    You are a total professional, and you stand by your product and service... that's all you can do.

    Jeanne

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jeanne,

    Thanks for that affirmation! I know every now and then I do run into this and even when you know you have done all you can - it still makes me feel bad that they are not happy...

    ReplyDelete

Building a community of business people who are interested in taking there business to the next level. The world is you oyster now find out how to access it!