The proof is in the pudding. Great expression. BUT What does this has to do with search engine optimization?
Well, The one good thing about search engine optimization is you really can’t BS. Now I have 1 million search engine optimization firms call me every week, (maybe a slight overstatement) promising to make me number one. The problem? They don’t even know what I do for a living when they call! The reason I say you can’t BS is that those firms typically are NOT in the top hundred for the search phrase “search engine optimization”. If it was so easy, don’t you think they would be number one?
My take on the whole industry is that it’s really a bullshit industry that sprung up with the advent of Google. When someone calls you up and promises to make you number one: hang up the phone. Do it quickly. Do not waste your time. No one can make that promise. (well, they can make that promise but they cannot fulfill it)
When I work on search engine optimization, I do it with a common sense approach. I don’t try and trick the algorithm, no on can. I work within Google’s guidelines. Quality content wins. Consistent solid content achieves desired results. Most people are lazy. If you can commit to a schedule of posting good content on a regular basis, you will improve in search results. Think about it like this. If you add one post a week, at the end of the year you posted over 52 new links within Google’s index. If during that same timeframe, your competition hasn’t added anything to their website. Shouldn’t you improve? Of course you should!
I recently had a chance to prove this to myself. A client (one of my most favorite) emailed me that they had noticed a drop in performance for organic search. We had been following a blueprint I laid out adding a lot of great content. So I was startled when I read the email. A little background: She had recently been working with a so-called SEO expert who fed her this nonsense about her rankings dropping.
I did a bunch of tests and found that not only had her company not dropped, but actually improved considerably! As I said the proof is in the pudding! I sent her the search results and she was thrilled. I made no promises other than we will improve if they follow my roadmap. She was number 1 for over 20 phrases! I was vindicated, and as usual the SO expert was proven wrong!
The pudding tastes excellent by the way.
I immediately jumped on a support chat with HostGator (the company which hosts this server). It took me about 20 minutes to get on a chat as since HostGator has been sold they can’t seem to hire enough technicians, and it can take a while to reach someone. I finally did, and the gentleman who was running the chat was extremely friendly and as helpful as he could be. But the problem is he is the first level support person. They are great for helping you with things like email and other simple settings and issues. But in all honesty, any halfway complicated issue is beyond their knowledge and/or capabilities. Typically they will open a ticket for you or tell you to request a reboot or things like that. So then you have to wait for the next level of support to actually look at the issue and handle it.
So what I am proposing is that web hosting companies have two levels of support chats, one to handle the minor issues and then have another for the more difficult problems. And so you don’t lose a bunch of time when you have a server down or other serious issues, the first level person should pass it along to the next level on the chat, instantly. That person can actually jump in reboot, look into more serious issues, hacking etc.
This would save so much angst for web hosting clients. As with many web development firms, I have several hosting accounts, but I still have to rely on hosting vendors to manage the day to day tasks. They are the experts in the field, and they are the ones we turn to. But in today’s world we have so many more issues affecting us, and the threat of hacking is real and it’s never a question of if you’ll be hacked, it’s a question of when. So we really need help from hosting vendors.
Bottom Line: Having a two level support chat will definitely help. But we also need better handling of major outages. We have seen a few of these in the last few months, lasting as long as 9 hours or more. We are bombarded with calls, and text messages, but can’t get through to webhosting companies as they can’t handle the volume. There has to be a better way. For one thing when a server is down, there should be an immediate email blast detailing the situation so that we can pass the information along to our clients. In that email needs to be an estimate as to when the issue will be resolved as that is what our clients need to know.
