I installed my default installation of WP 2.9.2 on gave the install a whirl to see how things go. But first update your plugins… 3 seconds later, “this site is being updated!” Wait a few more minutes, just in-case things are happening in the background. Nothing. No website, no admin, no new files on the server. Good times!

I then manually downloaded WP3.0 and uploaded it. Which partly worked. I had to do the database update, which I expected. But I still have an annoying message from WP: “An automated WordPress update has failed to complete.” Try it again. New message: “Abort class-pclzip.php : Missing zlib extensions”. Luckily for me I keep the PHP install directory ready to go in the event something needs to change. I also create a PHP install script so I don’t have to retype my install configuration. It is nothing more than a text file with 2 lines:

make clean

./configure <myswitches>

This makes it real easy to modify anything. This time I added –with-zlib and recompiled.

• JavaScript for all navigation items, there were no href=’page.html’, just href=’javascript:goto(‘page’)';
• Almost all the titles were the same
• 3 Pages had descriptions, out of 30
• no Meta Keywords
• Page names didn’t reflect what was on them

Looking to make the leap from web-developer to SEO provider I gave them a quote to recode the site, fix the 20+ issues that were working against them, and keyword targeting. All for a price they couldn’t resist.

Or so I thought!

After my designer contact gave them the quote and they slept on it, a few days later they hired someone else on the other side of the country to handle their SEO & local targeting, but I would still be doing the HTML work. I found this to be a little odd until the first spreadsheet of changes came in 3 weeks later. Keep in mind that my estimate was much less than the six month contract they signed with their new SEO company, probably about half.

What was on that spreadsheet was ‘new page names’ and ‘page titles’. No, nothing else. Not a mention of the poor HTML on the pages, the lack of actual links to pages, the lack of an H1, H2, or even H3, nothing about the description tags, keywords, or robots.txt file. Nothing except page names and titles. So this person doesn’t even have the knowledge that JavaScript links aren’t followed by search engines, or that the content on the page was more than half way down the source because of all the useless code. I’m still trying to comprehend what will be on the next spreadsheet of changes. Note at this point in time that their idea of good quality page titles all started with:

• Tachion Telcom Widgets :: Location, NJ :: Product Type ::

So we end up with a listing of 20 pages that look like:

• Tachion Telcom Widgets :: Location, NJ :: Networks :: Storage Services, Network Management
• Tachion Telcom Widgets :: Location, NJ :: Services :: Storage Services, Network Management
• Tachion Telcom Widgets :: Location, NJ :: Healthcare :: Storage Services, Network
• Tachion Telcom Widgets :: Location, NJ :: Military :: Storage Services, Network Management
• Tachion Telcom Widgets :: Location, NJ :: Libraries :: Storage Services, Network Management

To make matters worse I redid the menu system as part of one of the work phases, so the site will inevitably work better, empowering the SEO company into thinking what they offered helped more than it probably did.

One of the problems I’m noticing with SEO is that the customer is generally not aware of what they should be getting for what they are paying for. It appears as though (in this case anyway) the perceived value for SEO is off kilter because there is relatively no way for a customer to compare apples to apples unless they compare the results of two companies they have hired. In the long run this customer lost out because they were paying someone to tell them what to do, and then paying me to actually do it. I completely disagree with the changes I was told to make, but then again they aren’t paying me for my opinion… At least not yet.

How many times have you seen, or become the victim of, a situation where a decision made based on a perceived value that was clearly a mistake?

And the other question still stands… Does your SEO company know HTML?

This led to a pretty lengthy email of me showing them Google Local stats of what their local customers are looking for when they show up. In addition I did research on Wordtracker for what they wanted to target as well as what we are targeting, both in Google Local as well as SERPS. Granted the way we target Google Local is different, but I wanted to get a full overview of the ballpark we were playing in.

I narrowed it down to 5. The list below is laid out like this: the top 2 terms, 1 because its KEI is 1350, and the 2 we were discussing which happened to come in dead last.

If your not familiar with KEI, it’s a ratio equaling “(Searches ^ 2) / Keyword In Title or Anchor” , higher is better, and I’ve read that 1 is about typical.

On the flipside Google Local stats are showing our people looking for 4 times as many ‘Dragon Saddles’ as they are ‘Dragon Listener’, but they are not looking for any ‘Dragon Healers’, we must have a very hearty bunch!

So how do we figure out what our service oriented customers customers are looking for?

1.Pay attention to the stats. Granted Wordtracker gives a nice overall view of what people are looking for on the internet, but is that a definitive way to target your Google Local campaigns?

2. Have them ask their customer, whether it be during an entrance interview, an email, or even an online survey. If 200 people go to the website looking for ‘Dragon Saddles’ and don’t buy anything, but 20 go there looking for ‘Dragon Listener’ and do buy ask yourself 2 questions:

1) Should I do more targeting of ‘Dragon Listener’

2) How do I get people to buy Dragon Saddles?