7 Worst Things (bad) Seo Clients Do

There are clients SEOs love to have and then there are those other kind. Every SEO has them and very few SEOs can be so selective as to weed out every client that isn’t the “perfect client” (and those that do generally work only for themselves.)

Being the perfect client may not be attainable, but you can certainly avoid being the bad client nobody wants. Here are seven things bad SEO clients do:

Unreasonable expectations It’s not always the client’s fault when there are unreasonable expectations. Sometimes the SEOs propagate misinformation in order to get the sale. Other times once they get involved in the site things look far different than they originally appeared. It is the responsibility of the client to ensure their expectations are in check with reality, despite any claims of the SEO. This is especially true when it comes to overall expectations vs. monetary investment. There is only so much that can be done with the time and money allotted.

Expectations should be closely guarded with plenty of room for moving the goalpost, depending on the situation. Bad SEO clients expect results outside the bounds of what is likely and refuse to temper those as things change.

Don’t return calls or emails There is nothing worse than an SEO campaign being slowed down or halted by lack of client communication. If your SEO is asking for feedback, there is a reason for it. If they are waiting on you to provide information it’s possible that your campaign will remain at a standstill until they get it. Make it a point to answer all communications from your SEO as quickly as possible. The only person that suffers from holding things up is you!

Clients need to be engaged with the marketing process. Bad SEO clients can often be their own worst enemy and can impair the marketing efforts by not returning calls and emails to the SEO.

Forwarding SEO spam emails Why is it that SEO clients often have trouble with recommendations proposed by their SEO but whenever they get a spam email they forward it asking, “why aren’t you doing this?” This is the ultimate example of not trusting the SEO. You’re putting your faith in a complete stranger who’s spamming every site they can rather than trusting that your SEO knows what they are doing. If your site can’t be found, did you ever wonder how the spammers found you?

Clients need to be involved in the campaign development process, but bad SEO clients forward every SEO spam email they get. This forces the SEO to take time away from actual SEO work to explain why the email is wrong, why things aren’t as the email says they are, and to defend their work. That’s hours of wasted time.

Overwriting SEO’s work This is a personal pet peeve. SEOs go though a lot of research and effort before making any changes to a client’s site. Whether the changes are a major reworking of a page, or a few minor edits to a title tag, they all have reason and merit. The quickest way to keep an SEO from being successful with your optimization campaign is to overwrite their changes with your own. Fortunately, the CodeMonitor tool will notify the SEOs within 24 hours any time a monitored page changes (we monitor all our client’s optimized pages.) However it’s still up to the client to ensure such overwriting doesn’t happen.

To be successful the SEOs work must remain in tact. Bad SEO client’s don’t take the time to ensure they or their team work only from the live SEOd version of the site.

Argue every recommendation I once had a client that went item by item arguing every recommendation we made. Calls to action? Too lowbrow for his audience. Using keywords? Too pedantic. It’s important for the client to seek to understand the reasoning behind the changes, but you can’t expect the SEO to improve your website’s exposure if you are tying their hands in their efforts. If you don’t agree with what the SEO is doing, give them the rope to hang themselves. Track the results, if conversions drop then undo it. But at least give it a chance to perform.

Clients need to understand the value of what the SEO is doing. Bad SEO clients question every change forcing the SEO to exhaust hours of time explaining and defending every decision.

Try to out SEO the SEO I’m a strong proponent of the client being involved and having an understanding of the overall SEO campaign. However there comes a point where the client has to let the SEO do their job. The SEO was hired because they have a skill set and area of expertise, presumably one the client themselves don’t have. The client can’t assume they know more about SEO than the SEO does and must give the SEO freedom to implement SEO their way.

Working with the SEO with brainstorming and strategy development is a good thing. Bad SEO clients push for every SEO tactic they learn about or supplement their own SEO knowledge into the campaign.

Call/email all the time Communication is essential to a well-oiled optimization machine, but too much of anything is a bad thing. Clients who call the SEO up on a regular bases because they want to talk about this, that or the other, are not doing themselves any favors. Whether they want to talk strategy, success, implementation or whatever, these communications must be done in an orderly fashion. The SEO should not be expected to field regular unwarranted calls from the client that suck up the time they would otherwise be investing in that client’s SEO campaign.

Clients should be interested in their campaign but not at the expense of the campaign itself. Bad SEO clients spend more time talking to the SEO than the SEO has available, preventing them from doing the job they were hired for.

SEOs love to work with good clients. Consequently, good SEO clients get better results than bad SEO clients. Bad SEO clients suck up the SEO’s time, create distractions from the campaign and prevent the SEO from doing the things that get the results the client ultimately wants. Ensuring that you are not a bad SEO client also ensures that the SEO can focus on your success.

Fero Alenc know most of the best SEO tips, because he has been practising SEO for six years. For more information check Fero Alenc’s great SEO tips.

Insecure Firefox Plugins

Mozilla has introduced a service that checks Firefox browser plugins to make sure they don’t have known security vulnerabilities or incompatibilities.

The service debuted on Tuesday with this page, which checks 15 plugins to make sure they’re the most recent versions. Over time, Mozilla developers plan to scan additional addons, and they also plan to embed a feature into version 3.6 of the open-source browser that will automatically indicate which plugins used on a current page are out of date.

The offering builds on a feature Mozilla rolled out last month that warned Firefox users when they had an out-of-date version of Adobe’s Flash media player installed. In its first week, Mozilla statistics showed more than half of those who installed the latest Firefox release were running an insecure version of the frequently attacked plugin.

Not that the service has necessarily gotten off to as good a start as one might hope. Our tests failed to detect the use of Adobe Reader, another application widely abused by criminals. And other plugins, such as Google Picasa and the iTunes Application Detector were also left out in the cold.

But as Mozilla makes clear here, the page is only the beginning. Eventually, the organization plans to “create a self-service panel for vendors to update their plugin info as new releases come out.”

It’s initiatives such as these that demonstrate Mozilla’s dedication to the security of its users, and for that it deserves props. When legions of end users keep internet-facing software updated, we all win.

“We strongly recommend that add-on developers require SSL for updates to prevent the attack described above,” Window Snyder, chief security officer for Mozilla, stated in a post to the group’s developer blog.

The Mozilla Foundation released on Wednesday a patch for both version 1.5 and version 2.0 of the browser, fixing a critical memory corruption flaw.

Arhur Monderos is working in a company as antivirus software specialist and he runs his cool blog where he helps you to choose best antivirus software for you computer.

10 Seo Questions

I wrote a comment yesterday in response to a couple of blog posts that attacked SEO and the SEO industry, attempting to illustrate to the author of the rants that search engine optimization brings a specialized skill set and a core group of knowledge that can help others, from small businesses with great ideas, to larger organizations that can benefit from an independent voice that has experience and knowledge about search engines.

Unfortunately, my comment went unpublished for whatever reason.

One of the underlying assertions of the post I responded to was that in the hands of a competent web developer, a site should rank well in search engines as long as the people behind the site created something great and beautiful, and told a couple of friends. Another of the underpinnings behind the rants against SEO was that search engine optimization wasn’t a legitimate form of marketing. A third postulated that SEOs were the force behind such things as the botnets, blog spam, and scraped and autogenerated content that appears on the Web.

With the exception of striving to build something great, I couldn’t disagree more strongly.

The practice of SEO isn’t web development, though it sometimes requires that development problems on a site be addressed. Successful search engine optimization starts with a number of questions, such as:

Who is your audience? Who are your competitors? What makes you stand out from your competitors?

Some other important steps can include learning about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities,and threats to a business, defining business goals, collaborating on defining metrics to measure success, and developing an SEO strategy to optimize a site for search engines and for visibility in other places on the Web.

The practice of SEO isn’t spamming the Web, with the creation and use of spyware, viruses, and scrapers that autogenerate web spam. Instead, it’s helping people make intelligent and creative decisions that help them reach an audience that is interested in what they have to offer.

In my response, I included 10 questions involving SEO and search engines which might be issues that search engine optimizers might come across, that I wouldn’t expect most developers to have spent much time thinking about. I’ve written about most of these here, and I thought it might be fun to share them.

1. What impacts might Microsoft’s VIPS, Yahoo’s Template Extraction, and Google’s Segmentation of Visual Gaps have upon a search engine’s weighing of links, document representation, shingles based duplicate content detection, and categorization of topics on a page, and how might a search engine determine which segment is the most important?

2. What steps should one take to try to get a site to rank well for a query in Google Maps, and how might something like location prominence and location sensitivity of that query term impact the range and rankings of sites that appear in a Google Maps listing?

3. What are some of the potential flaws that a search engineer might make when using a discounted cumulative gain approach to evaluating the relevancy of search results at different positions?

4. How might image size, image resolution, image contrast, inclusion of a face in an image, use of images across multiple pages of a site, internal links on a site to images, and external links on a site to images impact the possible rankings of images in search results?

5. What should be contained in a video XML sitemap to make it more likely that the videos included are crawled and indexed by Google?

6. How might Google customize search results for a searcher based upon language and country preferences and past browsing history, even when a searcher isn’t even logged into their Google account and seeing personalized results?

7. What types of user behavior data might the search engines be using to reorder search results besides simple clickthrough rates, and how might those kinds of signals be used in determining sitelinks or quicklinks that Google, Yahoo, and Bing may show in search results?

8. How might a search engine determine which kinds of results besides web pages to blend into search results, and how might that approach change when named entities are involved?

9. What kinds of ranking signals might make it more likely that a news source ranks well in Google’s news search, and why might the search engine choose one article over others when the stories are substantially similar?

10. How are search suggestions (query refinements) chosen by a search engine to include in search results, and why might a search engine show one type of search suggestion at the top of search results, and another type at the bottom of the results.

Fero Alenc know most of the best SEO tips, because he has been practising SEO for six years. For more information check Fero Alenc’s great SEO tips.

Keep These Items In Mind When Choosing A Web Host

You have spent weeks building and testing your web site, getting it ready for visitors around the world to see. Now that your site is ready to go, you need to choose the best web site host. There are millions of hosting companies out there. How do you decide which to choose? Here are five tips to assist you in making the right decision:

1: Beware of Unlimited Resources Many web hosts offer what they refer to as “unlimited” file storage and “unlimited” bandwidth. Put simply, this means you can upload as many files to your account as you’d like, and there is no limit to the amount of visitor traffic your site can receive. This certainly sounds like a good deal, but the truth of the matter is that many hosts oversell on this promise and their service quality suffers as a result. This isn’t to say ALL hosts using this model are bad; some of the bigger names in the game do it just fine, but be aware of any smaller companies trying to compete.

2: What hosting packages are available? Will it be easy to upgrade if you find you need more space or added function later on? Web sites actually take up less disk space than most people think. A several page site with a few graphics takes less than 5MB. Unless you have a huge product database and will be selling online, you probably don’t need that 500MB package.

3: Is the web host company reliable? How long have they been in business? Your web site needs to be accessible. If your web site is always down, visitors may leave and never come back. Most web host companies advertise their average 24 hour uptime. It should be no lower than 99%.

4: Read The Review Forums! There are many websites with forums dedicated to discussing and reviewing the various hosting providers, and they are often an invaluable source of information that can help you make your decision. Look out for the forums that just want to make money off of ads, though. Find a community with many thousands of members so you know it’s the real deal.

5: Read The Terms of Service! This one is actually more important than many people realize. There are quite a few things you can do to get kicked off of your hosting account with many hosting companies, and they usually do not give you a chance to retrieve your files or configurations from their servers before deleting your account. If you plan to host a site containing adult content, inflammatory language, or other questionable content, make absolutely certain to read over the TOS carefully for any clauses forbidding such content. If you’re uncertain, ask customer support.

It is important to choose an established and well-respected web host that offers the hosting services you need at a reasonable price. With a reliable, professional web hosting company, your web site will be readily available to you and your site visitors, your data will be safe, you will be able to easily upgrade your hosting plan if needed and your hosting package will include FTP, email and other features so you can get the most out of your web site.