The last few days there has been some heated debate over an article written called SEO Workers.

Now it reminded me of a year ago when I found on a forum a company that claimed they provided SEO services. They would not touch HTML code at all. This just went to show you they did not understand onsite optimization. You see, engines look not only your incoming links, but also at your title, heading tags, and even ALT’s for your images to see how relevant it is to the search term. Of course there are a few rouge sites that show up for terms that don’t even appear on the site, and I think this is not common and they just are not competition. So if a SEO company will not change your content or site structure, stay away.

On the flip side if they believe all you need is onsite optimization, also stay away. Engines also look at your incoming links and the anchor text used in those links to also judge your ranking and relevance. If they are unwilling to do things such as directory submissions, article submissions, placing links on relevant sites, and blog/forum posts, Stay away.

These are the two extremes I have seen in the last year in the SEO world. And a company that goes out and blindly does some of these thing does not know what they are doing. They need to know what areas need work and focus on that, while keeping their client informed and analyzing results. In the article mentioned above Janeth mentioned a list of things a site should consider doing to be successful on the web. But here is a list of things an SEO company should be performing or willing to do if necessary.

1. Change your HTML.

2. Create internal links.

3. Analyze keywords, and see which ones are worth ranking for (conversions and traffic).

4. Aggressively seek for incoming links.

5. Research and test areas for improvement.

6. Keep the client updated.

I would like to share some thoughts on MS Access as a development environment… About 2 years ago I worked for a company that developing applications in Access was how things were done. Now don’t get me wrong, I think Access has its advantages. Come on we all need something to keep track of our CD/DVD collections right?

I went to that company with experience in vb.net and C++, and a degree in Software Applications and Programming, so I was not a newbie in the desktop application development world. But never the less, my boss thought Access could do everything. On one occasion we had someone come in and give us some project requirements. It had to be a suite of 3 applications that interact with each other with one database behind them. Also it would be common that the database would have 10-20 million records. Now I have designed some databases in Access and when you reach around 1 million records things get a bit slow. During the meeting I brought up the idea of developing in .NET with a SQL Server Backend. I felt I was about to be fired when he screamed back in disgust. Well the client decided to go with us anyway (I have no idea why). And I was told to get going on developing it in Access. Well when I left I was just about complete building the first of three applications and it was a huge mess. The thing was slow and clunky, yet my boss could not figure out how to speed it up.

In the end I worked 12 and 14 hour days trying to make Access do something it was not designed to do. When I took the job I just wanted something to get development lifecycle experience, but in the end found that there are people in the development world that hang onto tradition way to long and need to try something new.