But what would be the point in that? If you have a site, of course you want traffic. Surprisingly there are some clients that do not even think about seo. I am always battling to encourage those important stakeholders in a web project to use implement seo before the site has been built, ever before the wireframes are signed off.

Here are a few tips to help those fighting for seo overcome the hurdles:

1. Keyword research
You need to have evidence to back up why you want to use certain keywords for the website. If it is a new product launch and there is no search volume, use Google Insights to show how popular the term is.

2. Google Caffeine
What I like about this is that so many non seo people picked up on caffeine and the fact they thought it would affect their site dramtically. Little did they know that caffeine was working in the background and it was the press release by Google in June that announced they were happy with caffeine. In companies I have worked in, people are more responsive to seo when there are press releases from Google about algorithmns and updates.

3. Title and meta description
If there is not much you can do on the page as that would spoil the “design”, then at least optimise the page title and meta description. The page title is one of the most important elements of seo, you must make sure the keywords you want the page to rank for are the first terms in the title tag. Despite what the brand team may want, I would put the brand name at the end of the title tag.

4. Optimise their press release
If the company has press releases that they regularly post on their website, but has very little optimised copy, make sure you insert links in the body copy. Choose a couple of keyterms where you want to link from on the press release and link internally to that desired page.

5. Monitor all results
Make sure you report back on the results that you see in regards to the changes made. This will then give you more evidence to push forward for more seo changes. Once the client is amazed by the little work done so far and the amazing results, then you can suggest implementing seo as BAU on any new webproject.

Once clients have seen results, they can then begin to understand how important seo is for their website. Don’t give up if they are proving difficult and are reluctant to spend a lot of money on seo.

Waiting for the caffeine to kick in

Last August Google first announced Caffeine. And they also set up a developer sandbox for user feedback
www2.sandbox.google.com but now it seems as though they don’t want people to know which IP points to the Caffeine data centre.

There has been talk of caffeine since August 2009. For those of you unaware of caffeine, it is an upgraded and new version of the Google search engine.

Matt Cutts described caffeine as:
“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

So after all the hype what is going on?
Google seems to be doing a lot of tests, perhaps they have found more issues than they are happy with before they want to announce caffeine is live.

According to Search Engine Land they get emails from people saying they think Caffeine is live. But Google says Caffeine isn’t live on Google.com — it’s still only at one data center, not much seems to have changed from last November when Matt Cutts said Caffeine was available at this IP address: 209.85.225.103.

Maybe Google have seen how many faults they have had with Google Buzz and are really trying not to let out a new product without fully testing it. If they wait any longer I am sure the other search engines will be releasing their own version of caffeine, they may call it coffee.

Photo is from flickr