Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Another day, another blog entry... today was sunny and cold in Minneapolis. The mail arrived early, so I was glad I put some letters out early so the postman could pick them up. I had a number of new clients call, one sells specialized software (HIPPA?) for human resource departments, and one is a law firm in Dubai! Dubai is in the middle East, U.A.E. and I admit to needing a map to tell you exactly where that is. But this is one of the things I love about having my own company and being contacted by people from all over the world. I just had a meeting with a man from India.

I have made some mistakes in the past, as hard as that may be to believe, and I will make new mistakes in the future. It is my goal and great hope that I do not repeat past mistakes again. One of the first SEO projects I took on for a paying client was for a fairly large site that sells artwork. To make a long story short, the staff of the company did not implement my work correctly and the results of the project were a disappointment to the client, who I discovered was expected much more than I ever said I would deliver. The client was only willing to pay me $400 of a $1,200 project, but I told the client that if he was NOT satisfied, that I did not want any money from him.

Since that time, my #1 priority is to set the client's expectations. If they want top placements in a search engine, I offer to help them find someone. I know from working on over 45 projects in the past two years that I can increase qualified traffic to a client's site by 2-4 times what it was before, and that is a conservative estimate. I also know that unless the site should change, or people use different terms to search with, that the traffic will remain fairly constant and not need monthly or quarterly updates.

I take time with clients and have patience in answering their questions. I do extensive keyword research and optimize the site in a manner that is consistent with good results that have been proven on almost all of the past projects. While some may nit-pick about this or that, the truth is that I have proved to myself and my clients that I do good work and think about their interests first in what I do. To me, that is the most powerful and most effective way to do business that involves working with other people. There are lines of work where you can indulge in greed and self-interest, but that generally does not work well in a service business.

I used to think that the world of business was the complete opposite of any kind of spiritual life. I now know that was incorrect. A spiritual life and be lived in any situation where the self and be given a back seat.

The search industry is changing. If you are too close, you will miss the signs. Some things lately have caused me to step back and take a look around and I'm picking up on some new directions that I think will become mainstream.

The idea behind GRUB, for example. Makes perfect sense, but I just tried to load it on my home PC and I could not get it to run as I did at the last job I had. This concept needs to be open source and the results publicly available.

The Search Industry needs to change, and I don't know how that will happen, but I feel certain that it will. It is not in balance and in nature, things out of balance seek to become balanced.

(hris

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