Good SEO Companies Diversify.
January 15, 2008 on 9:57 am
Filed Under:SEO, Web
Mike Grehan recently wrote a column titled, “The Diminishing Value of the SEO Shop” which, as doomsday-ish as it may sound, is actually pretty accurate in it’s foretelling of where the industry will probably head.
When I started doing SEO, back in they day, it wasn’t even called that. In fact, I don’t recall it even having a name other than “our static pages”, meaning link-heavy directory-style pages whose content didn’t tend to change.
While our ideas, tactics, and their implementation were ever-changing, the bulk of the SEO that we did was a fire-and-forget missile (lock onto the target, launch and then wait for the “BOOM”). Monitoring and analysis was ongoing, but the SEO efforts were really only changed in minor ways every 6 months or so.
Finding myself in an industry where I was referring to myself as an “SEO” more and more, I also found that I was doing more and more to enhance what I was offering in terms of SEO. At times, it went beyond optimising for search engines and into the usability and functionality aspects of a site, though the line item on the invoices was still “Search Engine Optimisation”.
Our company now finds itself unique among our competitors as we’ve broken out that secondary step of optimising a website into something that we call, for now, Web Analytics, with a tagline that should be something along the lines of, “Optimising for Search Engines is only the first part, you’ve got to have a web site that people like too.”
Jex Analytics has a focus on the bigger picture in a time when there just doesn’t seem to be a name for it yet other than Web Consultants, and even that can lend itself to ambiguity.
The point is, regardless of what you call it, it all comes down to making a site as successful as possible (making the most money really). Grehan may sound as if he’s bagging on the purely SEO firms, but he’s not. What he’s actually saying is that, much like our SEO tactics of, “Experiment, Analyse, Adjust” we, as businesses, need to do the same.
When it’s time to optimise a site web consultants, SEO experts, web analytics experts or whatever you wish to call them, need to think more about the bigger picture and less about the nuts and bolts of how to get a site’s rankings to improve.
Rankings, Traffic, and PageRank are all important things (well, the latter may depend on who you talk to) but the fundamental tenet that anyone interested in success should cling to is simple:
Have a Good Website.
The unspoken thought following this is, of course, ‘and then hire us to make it better‘.
Dear Google Claus…
January 3, 2008 on 9:16 am
Filed Under:SEO
I honestly and sincerely thought that I had been an extra good boy this year. I played by all the rules, was patient and kind, and was rewarded accordingly.
That is, until Christmas Day.
As you well know there’s a certain key phrase that’s been quite good to us over this past year, bringing in folks looking for a good quality service, Search Engine Optimisation in Perth, Western Australia.
For some reason, instead of a shiny new bike or even the gift of continuing Goodwill and Good Fortune, I got a great big ol’ lump of coal. Our ranking for two of our most important phrases dropped from Page Numbering ONE way down to Page of the Number THREE.
That’s not particularly in keeping with the Christmas Spirit now is it?
What is it that I can do? Should I blog more? Should I get more inbound links? Give more to charity?
I suppose I’ll just do my best, and continue plugging along and following the rules and just hope that you were trying to teach me some sort of lesson about not taking something so good for granted.
Lesson Learned. And it’s a Brand New Year! Let’s start it off with a bang, eh?
Please?
Sincerely Yours,
Jex Analytics
