A lot of my friends are keen on web development. This job is pretty interesting but it has a lot of delicate issues. Actually working with your PC, sitting in front of the screen and surfing different sites seems to be much easier when it comes to communicating with alive people. You have to know that people have emotions, ambitions and sometimes difficult nature. Interestingly that despite your area of expertise, there comes a time in each web developers experience when you have to tell a client that their site, to put it plainly foolish and lousy. I have been working with clients through telephone service, e-mail, fax for at least 7 years. Due to my acquired skills I should say that I’ve discovered the hard way that the direct approach isn’t always the best way to inform a client about his not good site.

Amazingly that even if, deep down, the clients know their site is a rubbish-bin, the thing is that they often have a lot of time and money invested in it, and are desperately bound to be defensive and insistent when it comes to web developer’s criticism. In this respect the problem is evident: occasionally clients need to know the truth, no matter in which way they’re told about it. What’s your manner of telling the truth? At first try to be positive even if you have found many disadvantages and weaknesses of the client’s site. Remember that any bad news, sometimes should be eased. What’s more start with a little good news first. To be honest it’s difficult to face a hopeless site that can’t be salvaged. Try to avoid your first reaction and take a good look at what your client is doing right. Even the worst website might have a proper navigation plan, good copy, or a solid architecture.

Eventually, your job as an internet consultant, whether you’re a designer, usability specialist, or SEO expert is targeted at helping to your client’s business advance. So while you’re breaking the bad news, adhere to the business case: gently explanation, point by point, why the site is hurting your client’s practical result.
Especially when you’re talking about design, it’s easy to bewilder your client opinion with fact. Tell your criticisms in a delicate way, whenever possible, and impersonal. To add, be especially cautious around issues that involve personal taste and opinion, such as color schemes. Even if the truth in on your side the client can perceive your remarks as offensive and useless.
The best method is to hold things from getting personal is to bring in a 3rd party buffer. For a large campaign, this might mean an in-person resource, but often it just means citing online articles, market facts, or other industry experts.

To conclude when you’re a paid consultant, everything has to come back to solutions. The best way to soften bad news is to be prepared to tell your client how to solve the problem. Ultimately, bad news only matters if it’s permanent, and providing answers isn’t just a good communications strategy, it’s the job.

It seems like it is time to change strategy for some of us. News about Google lists subdomains differently in its SERPs has proven.

There was a great strategy to dominate in Google SERPs but Google become only smarter… So, there will be no such chance anymore to get all 10 spots in Google’s SERPs page by spamming it with subdomains. Sites have long used and abused subdomains as a way to dominate the SERPs – rather than getting just 2 of the 10 spots on a results page, webmasters used that 5 subdomains on the same site can help to take all 10 results on a SERPs page. That is why having plenty of subdomains on your site is not so useful anymore. About this Matt Cutts said: ” in some circumstances, Google may move closer to treating subdomains as we do with subdirectories.”

One of the main and well known things for all seo experts was that subdomains on separate domain were considered by Google as separate and independent domains with its own PR, backlinks and etc. And Google now start using a filter called “host crowding” and it works as a filter for subdomains, so there’ll be only two links in SERPs on one result, a site and one subdomain. That was made in purpose to show only two spots with similar site (subdomain included) on SERP page with 10 spots.

Talking with a client or just chatting with friend about my work sometimes become really complicated for my friends and then even for me. I’ll explain. I’ve come across such a great phrase as “if it is new for you it doesn’t mean that this is new ” and this works vice versa. So, talking about PPC advertising it is really difficult to speak without using specific terms and it is easier to explain them once then always try to avoid those. And to describe the whole picture and be clear here goes the list of online advertising terms, maybe those definitions will help you to clear up something or you can just use them and show your friends in order not to explain all those terms by yourself:)

Ad Impressions

is the display (serving) of an online ad

Page Impression

or page view is the call of a complete web page by a browser

Display Advertising

includes all forms of visual banner/button/tower ads that may be any mix of images, video, sound, text and interactivity.

Ad Serving

is the process/technology associated with delivering (serving) and tracking online ads.

Ad Trafficking

is the process of supplying campaign creative materials and tracking links to publishers through an ad serving platform.

Ad Op

Advertising Opportunity

CPA

Cost Per Actionpayment model for advertising. Publisher is paid for actions that occur on site as a direct result of the advertising.

CPC

Cost Per Click payment model for advertising. Publisher is paid for clicks delivered as a direct result of the advertising.

CPM

is the cost per 1000 ads served by a publisher.

CTR

Click Through Rate

Post Click Tracking

is the process/technology for measuring the effectiveness of an ad campaign after the viewer has clicked on an ad. This is typically done using ‘tags’ that measure the pages viewed on a web site directly following a clickthrough.

Post Impression Tracking

as above but focuses on tracking interactions with an ad after the impression is served. Interactions may include “replaying” a movie within the ad, submitting data through the ad and initiating a rich media component of an ad such as expanding a banner down. This type of tracking allows advertisers to see how users engage with the ad prior to clicking through.

Text links

are ads that rely soley on words to communicate the advertising message with no supporting imagery.

I have been saying for the last few days–SEO experts are still placing way too much value on things that are mattering less and less. According to the report, the definition of optimized websites are sites with appropriate titles, keywords, site architecture and other items related to spiderability.

Should companies have appropriate titles and meta tags? Of course they should–that is a given. But can you expect to see huge leaps in search engines because of those factors if your site has not built authority in the search engines? The answer is no unless you are in an industry without any competition. If you don’t believe me, just try it.

You see, this last item is the dirty secret of how SEO relates to internet retail. Generating inbound links to a commerce site is many times harder than generating links to an informational site. Unless you are selling a unique product that has a lot of appeal, you have will have to work very hard and creatively to find ways to obtain inbound links without paying for them or bartering for them. While either of these things may be OK, depending on your industry, you simply may not be able to afford to pay for enough links to get where you need to be.

If you are selling products that everyone else is selling and you have no competitive advantage such as being in a position to lowball everyone else, you are in big trouble in 2007. Why? Because other sites are not going to give away links to commercial e-tail sites without a very good reason. In my opinion, internet retailers are struggling in SEO mostly because of their inability to build their sites’ authority through natural inbound links. Fixing meta tags is not going to overcome this problem.

As an internet retailer, our SEO strategy is this simple–do the obvious stuff like on-site optimization and then find a way to create a competitive advantage. This strategy will work well in 2007, but more importantly, will still be working in 2010.