Something SEO this way comes…
April 21, 2008 on 12:15 pm
Filed Under:SEO
I’ve seen it happen all too often lately, where someone is hired simply for SEO and nothing more. The client is looking to sit better with the Search Engines and figures that there’s some sort of “trickery” to get this to happen. “If only we could hire someone to do something about it,” they think, “we could harness some of their witchcraft for our own purposes.” Fiendish cackling aside, this is not terribly far off the mark as far as what goes down in the clients’ noggins.
So they hire someone to do some SEO, figuring that something magical may happen. Sometimes it does, usually it doesn’t, and they go away wondering just that much more about whatever it is that happens when someone “performs” SEO. Search Engine Optimisation isn’t a magic trick or waving a wand. Anyone with 15 minutes to spare can Google the term and figure that much out. Hopefully, information on the basics of it will spread thoroughly enough throughout the web such that the majority of people seeking the service will start to understand that.
Part of educating others is blogs like this one, where we debunk a few myths and basically use a very no-nonsense approach to our language and industry references. I’m the same with my clients, in that I don’t sugar-coat a whole lot, instead shooting straight from the hip in the hopes that no one will have to waste time or money.
Well, I’ve been busy lately (too busy to even blog, heh), and I’ve been working on something that is even bigger than just words in a blog or a voice on a phone. I’ve been building something. I don’t want to go into too much detail just yet, but it’s pretty cool, this thing I’m building. It literally “popped” my eyes open at about 4 AM a few weeks ago, and I haven’t stopped working on it since.
Here’s a basic rundown… I’d been thinking lately about all the SEO and Web Analytics tools out there, free and otherwise, that I use for my business and are pretty much integral to making me money. Most of them are great and I love them, but I still use them for my explicit purposes, and not necessarily as the creator had in mind. There are still other tools that only do a small fraction of what I really need, leaving me to do the rest manually.
Well, I started searching, really looking, for something that did what I, in particular, needed. And I couldn’t find anything that did it. Oh, some stuff came close, and I could pretty much do what I needed by combining data from about 5 different places, but who wants that? At the end of the day, I wanted one place, for me and my clients, to stop in and check out how certain things were going.
And that’s what we’ve got now. I’m just tweaking it and trying to make it a bit more usable. Thankfully, I’ve got clients (and Friends!) that are helping me with this. Soon, I’ll roll this sucker out to a few industry colleagues and have them see if it is indeed something that is both exciting and usable.
And, dear reader, once it’s ready, I’ll make it available to YOU. Trust me, it’s worth the wait, especially for you SEOs out there that are tired of trying to be Google Webmasters too.
Until next time, have a good site.