SEO

There are a few aspects of SEO that I tend to feel are either misunderstood or not communicated to clients properly:

There are more factors than keyword density that go into how realistic it is that a clients site can appear in the top 10 organic search results:

# of Competitors
Clients rarely look to see how many of their fellow competitors are vying for the same real estate…obviously, the more there are, the more difficult it is to rank highly.

# of Quality Links
Your site must link to and from quality partners relevant to your product/service
Some sites don’t want to divert traffic to another site because they “don’t want to lose traffic”. Trust me, if someone wants to bail, they’re going to bail. Just because you have an external link doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to lose sales. Quality links will always help you.

The client’s favorite keyword isn’t always the one to focus on. Often times, a clients primary keyword list are not the keywords actually searched by their consumers. That’s why we must research keywords and find those that have a balance between search volume and competitiveness: you want to focus on keywords that are moderately searched and don’t have a ton of competition. If you focus on just high volume keywords you will run into a lot of competition which will make it difficult to rank. So stuck with a moderate balance.

Size does NOT matter
Just because a company/website may be a huge leader in an industry does not mean that they’ll rank well organically. If a tiny advertiser has a site with lots of content, that small business owner will rank higher than the dominant company with Flash intro’s, lots of images, and even a better site experience. SEO doesn’t care about how flashy the site is…it’s just the nature of the beast. This actually leads to the next issue….you ALWAYS have to determine what the goal is. If the goal is the build a killer site with great design, imagery and an overall user experience, you are going to have to sacrifice organic listings….that’s just how it goes. So sometimes if a client wants great graphics and other interactive components, you have to put SEO aside and not worry about it.