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I am not an seo but know the basics and have made a good fist of the sites under my control. The sites that I have been asked to work on are a complete mess and have not even the basic seo elements in place.
Usual story of web designers fresh out of college and a dab hand with flash, writing dog doo sites with no tags, decent copy or anything else - but hey the sites have lots of colour and cartoony type things going on so of course they blag the customer into thinking theyve bought the next amazon.
Locally there is a huge market for simple seo and I am thinking seriously about starting a service for introducing basics to sites that have zero input so far.
But - there are a few things nagging me and before I get any deeper I need some advice on the following:
1) How do you approach the thorny issue of telling webmasters they have missed vital elements and their job is only half done?
2) seo's are not necessarily web designers and I dont want to mess with someone elses code so how do you implement html changes with webmasters - particularly reluctant ones?
3) Im not going to overstep the mark and make promises I cant keep (I wont be guaranteeing top ten on google in 7 days!)but shall be sticking to simple and effective directory listing, KW research etc, tag elements etc - But what are the top 5 (or 10?) most important basic seo elements that simply have to be introduced to any serious development process?
4) How much knowledge of web editing programs should you have? Is this necessary for even a basic seo service?
5) Any do's and donts - any trap doors - any good advice about bad advice?
My pitch here is simply that whilst I may be an seo baby - I know enough and I see hundreds of poorly written dead end sites (locally) that need help with basic sensible seo. I can provide the help and simply wish to start off the right way.
Grateful for any advice
C
