I've been avoiding taking on any paying SEO clients ever since I got my first back channel offer on WebmasterWorld in 2003. The thought of constantly telling a client that there is no way to guarantee results on a particular keyword just didn't have much appeal. And I really had to wonder how much worse it would be when the person contacted me through webmasterworld.

This time things are a bit different. One of the other moderators on BGT contacted me about working with the company he recently joined. They've been online since 1998, and their site looks it. Their IT guy has been begging them for years to update things but they never bothered. Now, someone in power has noticed that they aren't ranking for the keywords that they want, so they want it fixed yesterday. Sound familiar?

I took a look at their website, and I've decided to give it a go, as long as I can convince the suits that there is no magic silver bullet that will bring you instant rankings. What I can get them is increased, on target traffic.

The first step, get them fully indexed. It's hard to rank for anything when you only have 2 pages in the index. I figured that something was wrong when I first went to their site in firefox and the only link I could see on the page was the one to their contact form. I looked at the source, and there were these funny applet scripts. Opened the page in IE, and suddenly a mess of buttons appear. Why do you suppose that they only have 2 pages in the index?

Then, once they get their indexing problem straightened out, they have a pile of canonical issues waiting for them. Two domain names serving the same content, both of them serving to www and non-www. Not to mention the /index.htm or / issue.

They also have huge sections of meta keywords on all their pages, but no meta description and few of their pages even have titles.

I can't do much for them on their lack of content issues, other than convince them that if they want to be considered an authority, they should act like one. They probably have a higher percentage of doctorates than Google does, and all of them are published. They have people that can write, so why don't they write something?

Hopefully the will be willing to go along with my plan of working 10 hours/week. I'd really rather keep it in that range so I can keep up with my own websites and my school work.