SEO & Website Design San Diego

Note to the average reader, this post is not the easiest to read, I just had to let off steam.

I've had an seo client for 2 months, and give up on as a client that isn't ever going to learn, and I haven't got the time or energy to do their SEO anymore. Whats wrong you may ask? With this client, I have done 50 hours of unpaid work for them, cleaning up the code for their website, to make it easier for me to work on in the future... plus the $350 worth of SEO worth each month.

I've done the same work, both clean-up and SEO work 2 times now, and each month once their payment clears I go back to the site to download the latest versions of the pages to work on, which is a just good habit to get into, in case some change has been made, these should be exactly the same as what I uploaded the previous month, since I'm supposed to be the only person working on the site.

But each time the work I did the previous month has been overwritten with older versions of the site, and not has it been overwritten, it was overwritten with a couple of days of me doing and uploading it.

So all the work I have done is undone, before google has even seen it. The first month I thought the old SEO had hacked the site, and since i had a hard-drive die on me, I didn't have the files I uploaded, so redid the work, and re-uploaded it straight away, at the beginning of March, I again discovered the code was the old one, so cleaned it up and redid the SEO work.

Now the owner, really can't see why I shouldn't do it again. The client swears it's not anyone there that doing this, but today I get an email saying uploads have been done, they were supposed to upload 5 or so pages.

Since I had done this months SEO already, and uploaded it on Saturday,(because I got sick of waiting for these 5 pages to be uploaded, it's been almost a month getting here, and the website owner was bitching that I hadn't worked on his site), and I agreed to redo these 5 pages. when they got around too uploading them..... so I go to look at the pages in the file manager , every single page including the google verification file has been uploaded over my SEO work done on Saturday.

It turns out that the sites owners staff have done all sorts of work to the site they never bothered to tell me about, so it's not just a case of reuploading the work I did, the business owner was most put out when I said I wouldn't redo the work yet again on the new pages uploaded today.

Even though I explained first that I had done 60 hours this month getting the site fixed again, his response was well you can do it again.

Before this happened today, he wrote on the weekend after I finished uploading saying they couldn't afford to pay me for a couple of months, with the insinuation that my SEO work wasn't working....
 
OF COURSE THE SEO IS NOT WORKING...... IT'S BEING OVERWRITTEN EVERY MONTH........Faster than I can do the work.
 
So I again have another SEO space in my timetable. So anyone out there wanting SEO Consultancy I'm sick of offering SEO Services.

Regards Lynny
SEObyCanz.com
Canzdesign.com
SEO San Diego

Getting On Google Expert

Best SEO Results, from the BEST SEO!!!

Not The Cheapest SEO, I get SEO Results

A few posts ago, I wrote about a couple of websites selling giftboxes using google adword (they the sponsored links you see in google searches) since then I have noticed this is quite common, websites that have obviously paid for what they thought was seo, and yet still having to use google adwords, and paying top dollar for the top position on search pages.

Whats going on, are there so many cowboy SEO out there, that these sites are just getting ripped off, the sites I'm talking about now, are very professional looking, as were the ones I saw a couple of days ago, they are not so site slapped together by the a cousin of one of the workers friends or anything, they are top notch designs.

No wonder some people have a bad or negative view of SEO, I'm not saying this because I do SEO, but I truly feel bad about the sort of SEO work being done by these cowboys, from these high price web designers.

It makes me wonder I tell you. I'm thinking of offering offering a money back guarantee, that the SEO work I will do will definitely attract more targeted visitors, and that the SERP's (Search Engines Results Page) will list there site for a spefic number of phrases.

It really isn't a hard guarantee to keep, if you are an honest SEO, and actually do the work you're being paid to do, oh sure some keywords or phrases maybe impossible to reach #1 ranking for but getting a result within the first 10 results isn't that differecult. I guess the way to make a money back guarantee would be to come t an agreement with the website owner, on what words at least need to reach page one of the SERP's, and stay there for at least 2 months... if a phrase stays there for two months, it generally stays there for a year at least, depending on the competitors of course and if they have a good SEO work on their site.

As I said the other day the gift box website I do SEO for has gained #1 ranking for the word boxes, as well as many many other searched for keywords and keyphrases.
In fact of the 757 keywords and key phrases used by searches in mainly, New Zealand, Australia, England, USA, the 4 main English speaking country's, the words and phrases they used to find her website in the past 30 days according to Google Analytics 378 of them appeared in the first 10 rankings of page 1 of google.co.nz

google NZ
MSN NZ
AltaVista NZ

I was talking to the owner of this giftbox and hamper website just today, and she's decided to sell the business, ask it's value has increased so much since the website is now attracting so many visitors resulting in untold sales. I have been working on that website since mid September last year, just 9 months. Remember this site was not attracting any visitors at all when she first contacted me, she was just using the site to send her existing clients to.

Regards Lynny

I thought you maybe interested in a service I offer to website owners.

Instead of investing in a lot of SEO work at once which could be an investment of $2000 or more, depending on the size of the website, and the work that needs doing, I have quite a few clients who own small websites, who invest a small amount each month and I make small changes to their website, and do SEO at a slower pace. This ongoing work means their websites stay ranking highly in search engines.

This system helps first the client but also me, clients find it much easy to set aside a regular monthly amount and on my part it's good to know there is a regular income happening each month. I of course have regular clients who have had SEO work done, and I tweak their sites each month but this system is different.

For people who maybe aren't sure if seo will help, or that just can't invest in a lot of seo work at this time this system works well.

I have mentioned before that I have a goal of earning a regular income of $2000 USD a month, this doesn't of course count the one off jobs I do, although they amount to much more than this, I also want that regular income, so if there's a slow month, like January is, I know I have work to carry on until the next big job comes in. I often find that these regular clients get extra work done between the big jobs.

So if you are thinking about getting seo done on your website, or have considered it but just can't justify a large investment at this time, contact me, if you can be straight up, and let me know how much you'd like to invest monthly in marketing your website, We'll see what arrangement we can come to.

Cheers Lynny
help1@seobycanz.com

SEO friendly webdesign, Best Prices for best results
NZ's Best SEO SEO Know ALL
SEO Hints and Tips

So if their are so many sleazy SEO out their, how do you tell them from the good ones.

1. A good SEO won't give you a quote before they know all the details about your website and what results you want to achieve, unless that quote is for at least multiple $10,000.

2. A good SEO will usually talk in words you understand, rather than try to boggle you with geek speak.

3. A good SEO will probably ask you your budget, and work within that budget.

4. A good SEO will ask you a lot of questions, you may think some questions are odd, but the less guesswork a SEO has to do the more likely you are to get a good job.

5. A good SEO will invite you to ring them to discuss your needs. Although a lot of work from home's myself included, don't like to give out their home address, honest people are quite happy to give out their phone numbers... ring them, at least once to confirm that the number they gave is the correct one. A landline number is perferable over a cell phone one.

6. A good SEO will never make rash promises, like yes I can get you to #1 position especially before they have researched the phrases you are after.

7. A good SEO will always ask if they can have access to the geeky side of a website, before they give you a quote, remember this, before you get a quote, you SEO should know if they can have access to the backend of the website... this doesn't mean that they have to be able to access it, but if they can't the SEO work that has to be done is quite different, much more time consuming so will cost more, or the type of work they do is the sleazy type, that can be turned off if you stop paying the monthly SEO fee, that might not have been mentioned in the original quote.

8. A good SEO will always be happy to answer your questions, and will be happy for you to question them, I have had a client say they were going to contact someone that knew SEO, I gave them all my contact details to pass onto their friend. Good SEO have nothing to hide about their work.

SEO isn't a one off thing that can be done, that works the same with every website, sure there are some things that every website needs, but each website, in my experience is unique, even two website selling the same thing.
SEO is an ongoing process, and although some SEO make one charge which includes the ongoing work, if you see or hear an SEO saying, your site will take a week or a month to do then be weary.

Ask your SEO what they are going to do to your website, then contact someone like me, offer to pay me $100 to look over their list, I promise you the $100 you pay me will be the best money you ever spend. Cause if there's something sleazy in there, I'll pick them up on it. Often it's the way something is worded, not what it says that's the tip off. And very often people that don't speak you native language will take advantage of this.

Cheers Lynny
An honest to goodness SEO
SEO Tips and Tricks
SEO friendly WebDesign

When the gods want to punish you.....
They start granting your wishes...

I had someone track me down through this blog today, and ask me how I learnt about SEO, and did I have any certificates to prove how good I was. (i think he doubted me)

Anyway, no. I didn’t learn SEO from a school, I learnt it by trial and error, but thought you might be interested to know about my humble beginnings.

I first started learning about SEO almost 7 years ago, before I knew it had a name.

We owned a Stock Photography Bank, and I noticed that if words were repeated on a page several times, that that page was like to appear higher in search engine results, the more times the word was repeated the higher it would appear in search engine results.

Through my interest, and inquistive nature, I realised if the title of the webpage - the bit that shows at on the top bar of your browser - had the same keywords, the page didn’t need to have the word repeated so many times and yet it would still appear high, and sometimes higher, in search engines.

Time went on, and I learnt how to read the code that makes up any webpage, and found there were other places that, if the keywords were repeated, that the page would rank even better in search engines.

Through applying what I learnt, and I have to admit making a few mistakes, I managed to get our Stock Photo Bank, ranking right up on page one of Google, often higher than the world’s largest stock photo banks like Corbis and Getty.

Once I saw this happening I was hooked. I found out about website statistics, and how to find out how many people were visiting my website, where they were coming from, what browsers they used, even what time of day they visited most, and then noticed how visitors rose at the same time my website started ranking well, and that each change I made that increased our site visablity, increased the amount of visitors. Now I was an utter addict.

I also found that changing the words slightly on every page, I could get the website listing higher for many different search.

Whats this SEO thing?
Somewhere about here, someone told me about SEO, and how it sounded like pretty much like what I was doing.

I joined a few forums, and mailing lists (about 50 different things). And yes, that's what I had been doing. I found though that many of the SEO big wigs were giving people information of how to do things, and the information wasn't true. It sounded good, but from experience I knew better ways of doing it.

I started adding my comments to posts and got a few people's dander up: who was I, an uneducated hick from New Zealand of all places, telling them what to do... I didn't tell anyone what to do, I just suggested different ways.... and when I pointed out the SEO was so new, it was, and still is hard to get an education from anywhere, I was barred from a forum.

I still belong to a few forums, that aren't owned by SEO gurus, but usually withhold my comments now or at least the ones I make on forums. Anyway back then....

I had the coder that kept the photo gallery running, and had him add SEO features, and so were the beginnings of a SEF CMS. I didn’t know then 6 years later I would eventually build a Search Engine Friendly, Content Management System.

We started building website for other people. And I applied what I knew to their sites, not realizing others could see the skills I had. Then someone wrote to me, about our stock photo bank, and asked why they always saw it in search engines, for every search they ever did for photos and stock photos. He asked me if i could do the same thing with his site, and offered me $1000.... wow this was cool, getting paid for something I would have done for free!

And so it went, I wouldn’t and won’t take a job unless I knew I could make a difference, and until recently websites that were database driven were a challenge I couldn’t rise to - I didn’t know how to edit codes for these sites, as it was very different to sites that where html.

Recently I met a coder, who is now working for me regularly, that will add coding to database driven website, opening up a whole new world be me, so now I can do SEO on any website I’m presented with.

To date I have done SEO on over different 40 websites, and am currently working on 7 sites, I have a personal limit of 10 sites at a time, as I like to give each site the time it deserves.

I now have 4 people working for me, doing the more time consuming aspects of SEO’s like directory submissions, and finding linking partners, but I always do the important work myself as I like to know exactly what's going on.

I understand that people coming to me for my services are in need of help, and often wonder if the investment I’m asking them to make will be worthwhile, when I know they have tried so many other things, and are dubious about this working. The least I can do is make sure it works, and the only way to do that is to do the work myself.

I have noticed that other people I employ to work for me, just don’t have the instinct or gut feelings that are needed to be an SEO, and while they are happy to do the work, they just can’t see how important it is, that any payment they may get must bring results to the person that paid them.

My goal with SEO is to earn $2000USD a month, and with up to 10 smaller business paying me $200 a month on average, this is obtainable. Sure I should charge more than what I do, but to be quite honest, I don’t want to earn that $2000 and more from just one big company, but at the rate I should charge, I would only be working 20 hours a month.

I live on the computer, so could do 20 hours work in one sitting, what would I do for the rest of the month? I’d far rather help out 10 smaller businesses, and work for less, and give those 10 clients more results than they expect.

Why the hedgehog mascot? Hedgehogs are inquisitive, and nose into every nook and cranny, looking for interesting stuff to eat, they have very big mouths, and are really good at spitting out what they don't like.... that pretty much sums me up, I look around for all sorts of information and I devour anything that SEO related and spit out the junk.

Regards Lynny
An SEO from the
School of Mistakes, and Successes.