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Tonight I saw a job posting that quite frankly offended me. Somebody was asking for a Search Engine Optimisation expert to provide a FULL-TIME 40 hours per week service for a measly £300 per month. Now, I have a big mouth and could not resist the temptation to contact this person and point out that this budget is, for lack of a better description, absolutely ridiculous.

Here is the job posting:

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*****We Kindly ask Companies NOT to bid on this project as it is intended for individuals only*****
We are Looking to hire for full time job position an SEO Expert to wok on our websites and increase our ORGANIC SERPs for a list of keywords that we be defined later.
We are in SEO/SEM for +5 years so you can have an idea with whom you will be dealing.
You will be either working in our office or install teamviewer on your station if your prefer working from home.
You will be invited to : Elaborate an SEO strategy and Implement it. We hope you know what Strategy means…
In order to apply, you are invited to PMl us the following :
1- Your resume with your full details + Experience
2- The SERPs ranking you have recently achieved (websites + keywords)
3- Your expected MONTHLY salary for full time job (40hours per week from Monday to Friday).
Important : Any PM missing the above details will be ignored.

Our evaluation of your skills will be based on a short strategy plan you will be providing us during selection. You need to convince us through your plan that your are the right person for this job position.
Please do not bid if you are looking for part time job! this is FULL TIME Offer for those who are looking for a stable job and long term relationship.
Our Maximum salary is $750 per month so don’t bid for more.

Start your PM with ‘I am Your Expert’

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At time of writing, this project had over 300 views and 5 applications (unsurprisingly). Below is my brief conversation with this person via the websites’ messaging system:

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Me:

$750 per month for a FULL TIME SEO expert?
You pay peanuts, you get monkey’s. Expect to triple that before a REAL SEO expert touches you with a 10 foot barge pole.

Employer:

your experience is just a peanut if you say this, because you are just seeing your neighberhood. I think you are far from understanding how SEO world is working today..

Me:

well you do as you please, but expect a bumpy ride!

Employer:

I am in this business since 2005. I know perfectly what I am doing
Just give a look to emerging countries, u will see by yourself that life isn’t so costly for them.
anyway

———-

So, my experience is just a peanut. Not quite sure he understood what I meant there…

What does worry me, however, is the mention of “emerging countries”, and the fact that this project has gotten 5 bids so far. Could it be that foreign suppliers are working for nothing and providing a good service? Is this a genuine emerging threat to the industry?

I severely doubt it. I was once a shareholder in an online clothing store and I worked the SEO for this site around the clock. After 8-10 months it started to do very well in the search engines, but it is only with this constant love and affection that a website can do well, and I’m afraid nobody is going to put that much effort in for £300 per month.

Browse Gumtree, view responses to freelance adverts, search Google or speak to just about any small business – there are so many useless individuals out there billing themselves as web designers with absolutely no idea what they are talking about. Just because you know your way around Dreamweaver does not equate you to a web designer.

Web design encompasses more elements than most people, it appears, even have a vague concept of. True design involves grappling with the idea of accessible design, thinking about information architecture and considering user navigation paths. Outside of this decidedly geeky bubble, you will quite often be tasked with copywriting and marketing, and producing eye-catching design that serves more of a purpose than “to look good”. Consider how the audience connects to the narrative of the piece; what you want them to achieve and how you’re going to accomplish this. I think if you don’t succeed in delivering more than what was asked, you fail your client and you fail at your job, because you’re not there to say “yes”, you are there to give added value to the project and business.

Generally, I can tell a web designers’ salt immediately by:

• Their markup
• Their visual design
• Their copywriting
• Their advert (if applicable)

Anyone whose portfolio page fails to pass transitional validation, looks a bit naff or sounds like it’s been written unprofessionally, will immediately get a red cross in my book, and should NOT be offering their services. Based in Leeds, I browse the local “web design scene” quite often, and I find too many individuals (and companies) not adhering to these standards that I consider to be the basic building blocks that form our industry’s foundation.

If you can’t even get your portfolio site right, you sure as hell should not be offering to build websites for other people.

I am considering naming and shaming a few local companies in the coming weeks, but I’m not sure I want to give them any publicity let alone a free backlink. Stay tuned.

One of the best things about this loan is that it promised a “repayment holiday” at a requested point during the lifetime of the loan, which essentially means you can take a 1 month break from paying back the loan. I’ve never needed to call upon this until recently when I became a full-time freelancer and needed to cut back on as many expenses as I can. So I went into my local branch who told me they do not deal with this area of business. Fine, they gave me a number so I went off merrily to give them a call.

I spoke to a clueless individual who passed me to another clueless individual who passed me to another clueless individual who then said I need to visit my branch. Yes, this after being referred to these people BY my branch. So I went back into the branch, who threw their hands in the air and claimed they do not deal with loan repayments. They gave me the same number again, and I requested to call it from the phone in the bank as I wasn’t prepared to waste any more money. This time, I got through to somebody who actually had a clue. She told me I was “ineligible” for a repayment holiday, but could not give a reason why but Computer Says No. I challenged this but Computer Says No, and she eventually asked to speak to a member of staff at the branch. I passed her onto somebody who quite quickly got angry with her, the call was ended and I went back to the front desk. He pulled up information on my account, and could not see any reason why I may be ineligible, short of Computer Says No.

Despite my demands, it seems that of the 7 people in total I spoke to at Lloyds TSB, none of them had the ability to assess my situation. I didn’t get my repayment holiday and I didn’t even get a reason why. There is no reason why. The computer’s have got it wrong, and it’s pretty worrying that clearly, this area of business for Lloyds is controlled by their systems. Either that or the repayment holiday is just a con.

The reason I am so angry is that, short of the fact that the repayment holiday would have been a pretty big help this month, it was a main selling point for this loan agreement. And I still have not got a good reason why I am “not eligible”.

After discovering various webmaster forums, I quickly began to notice the hype of the PageRank (PR). With this term being tossed around more often than a midget at a student houseparty, I decided to learn more about it. PR is considered a way of rating a website in an easily digestible way, on a scale of 1-10, based on the popularity of the website. PR is thought to consider inbound links, the inbound links of the inbound links, and the inbound links of the inbound links links… and so on.

The absolute misconception, and where everybody seems to have missed the point, is that PR does not reflect search engine rankings directly. Just because a website has a high PR, does not automatically mean it ranks brilliantly for every search phrase under the Sun. Sure, keyword authority plays a pretty big part in search rankings, but you can’t flog a dead horse – I’ve tried it. I’ve tried building hundreds of related links to poorly designed, rarely updated pages, and nothing. Google isn’t stupid – it knows that even if it’s in a room with Bing, Lycos and Ask telling it to eat a delicious-looking pie they baked, it knows the pie may contain poison, so avoids it!

Moving on from my bizarre analogies, PR plays an even bigger part in monetizing a website. Webmasters can sell links on their sites and they know that the higher their PR, the more money people will pay. This will probably have a positive impact on rankings providing they take everything else into account, but too many people concentrate on PR alone. I sure as hell wouldn’t want my link on a PR7 website about penis enlargement…

One of the most bizarre tasks that I am sometimes faced with however, is the CAPTCHA field aimed to keep out spam submissions. I understand their purpose and I fully expect to have to indulge the site owner in proving that I am in fact Human. The problem I have with the little f**kers is that sometimes they are incredibly hard to read and it can take 2 or 3 attempts before I get the bloody thing right! I’m not referring to the newer, more sophisticated ones that read the letters out to you, or allow you to refresh; I’m talking about the older ones with distorted lettering. Why does it even need to be distorted? As long as there’s no ALT tag telling the spam bot what the code is (that’d be funny) it could actually be as clear as day – this way Humans will understand it immediately but the spam bot won’t.

</rant>

After the time and expense, they had been left with nothing. Not even any ground work to pass onto the next supplier. I’m not exactly sure why, but I imagine it was a case of things getting lost in translation, incompetence on the suppliers part and possibly a lack of communication from the company themselves (though when I spoke to them they seemed extremely well-informed to their needs).

This can be avoided.

If you are a company looking to outsource work to agencies and freelancers, simply heed this advice:

Do your research

When you receive a job application, take some time to research the potential supplier. They should have provided their portfolio and some work examples. Look at what they have done and ensure it is up to scratch. You could even contact their previous clients to question their service.

Don’t trust people that will work for peanuts

This is a tough one; it’s SO easy to go for the cheapest option. But remember the saying – you get what you pay for. I’ve seen it many times; if somebody is willing to work for £2/hour, you don’t need to be a genius to know you should avoid this provider. In general I would suggest that you expect to pay at least £15/hour for a good job.

Communication is key

If you cannot talk to your supplier over the phone, you cannot work with them. E-mail and instant messaging is just not sufficient if you have medium-large projects.

Professional conduct

If your prospective supplier does not appear professional, don’t waste your time. I once had an application saying “hi i can do work cost cheap and quality will be better than expected” with zero punctuation, grammar and awful spelling. I didn’t even get a chance to reply as 4 minutes later another email from the same guy came through, practically begging me for the work. I was left with no choice but to reply saying “Sorry the position has been filled”.

Be warey of foreign suppliers

This is another tough one because it’s hard not to tar everybody with the same brush. I’ve been outbidded on pretty much every project I’ve ever applied for by people from India offering to work for literally nothing and their status as a supplier would fail on every point made in this article. This is absolutely not to say that all foreign suppliers are rubbish, but you really do need to filter out the crap.

In essence, picking the right supplier is common sense. Don’t allow price to dictate your choosing, and ensure that the prospective supplier has a good amount of work behind them and can provide exactly what you need. Otherwise you might end up throwing time and money down the drain.

Upon first entering the Starbucks website, you are presented with a rather rustic looking, coffee-coloured design (see what they’ve done there?). There’s some nice hand drawn imagery but, hang on, they’ve whacked the menu over half of it. If only I could just… pull… the image out…

But this isn’t a rant about the visual design of Starbucks because in honesty it’s not bad. Upon inspecting the source however, you see obtrusive JavaScript, inline CSS styling and use of tables for layout. Even the <title> tag for the homepage lies empty! No way would this mess pass any tests.

As a web designer struggling to get even medium sized clients, Starbucks would be a dream to put on my books. The design team behind this website cannot be forgiven, unless the site was built pre-millenium (which, I’ve not done my research on and it might well have been, but I doubt it).

Though, it’s not just the designers integrity I am questioning here. I navigated the website for a moment and at the bottom of the menu you see a link to “view international sites”. I gave it a click which presented a pop-up window (eugh) with a lovely 404 error inside of it. Why does this happen? Will somebody PLEASE tell me.

I use the analogy that if I nipped into a Starbucks for a quick coffee, sat down and read one of their company publications; NEVER would I expect to find a page listed in the magazine contents to actually be missing. One could argue that the magazine is proofed much further because it costs much more to produce and distribute. But this is absolutely not the point – your end user is still being left in the dark, whether a page is missing on your website or in your magazine.

Please leave your thoughts in the comments. I intend to do a few of these “shoot-em-down” posts about large company websites in the future, so do come back!

The site is still in BETA at the moment and can be found here. It’s a little clunky and doesn’t look amazing, but the idea is there and it’s still very functional!

Please leave your thoughts in the comments, as usual all will be appreciated

The actual bouce rate is calculated by the total number of visits to one page divided by the total number of website visits, and generally a good bounce rate is considered to be anything less than 30%.

If your bounce rate is higher than this, you don’t need to worry straight away. Consider the purpose of your site – if you run a news/article website for example, there is nothing to suggest that your users aren’t completely happy; maybe they found what they were looking for and then left. Such is the nature of a news/article website, I think it is entirely feasible that a user could only view one page before leaving.

Then there are technological aspects to consider. If your website uses frames, for example, and your main content is loaded in a frame that tracking code is not placed on, you are going to be seeing a significantly higher bounce rate. Similarly, if your website consists mostly of Flash, bounce rate is not going to be tracked at all.

Bounce rate stats are probably most important for people running e-commerce websites. It gives an insight into how valuable the content appears to the end-user and what immediate impact your landing pages have. If your bounce rate is high and your sales are low, there are probably a few good reasons for this…

Perhaps your copy is unprofessional and users are not convinced? Perhaps your design is lacking in the desired imagery? Perhaps you’re using an overbearing colour scheme?

There are fundamental tricks in getting your users to stay and explore further. Here are some that have proven effective for my clients:

• Clear navigation – let the user know where they are and what other information is available
• Clear headings – if I’m searching for rechareable batteries, I’m going to want to see this on the page I land on
• Related pages – using the above example, I know there are many different brands of rechargeable batteries, but if you don’t give me links to your product ranges I’m certainly not going to look myself
• Visual design – if I land on a page that looks like it was thrown together by a drunk baby, I’m probably not going to take you very seriously and will be hitting my back button immediately
• Graphical experimentation – people like to hover, click, drag and generally play with pages. Try experimenting with image rollovers, slideshows and generally engaging the user with the design.

These points when done correctly can improve your bounce rates, which ultimately will lead to better consumer confidence, better usability and hightened conversion rates – whether you’re looking for sales or leads. Please feel free to put your ideas in the comments, and good luck!