Every iteration of this site got worse. A good consultant knows a great number of tricks and techniques, and over the course of a year I tried just about every one I knew in trying to steer a course for this site. A good consultant knows that in the end, it's not about victory, it's about the client getting what he wants. Even when you disagree.
If I'm a prospective employee talking to an interviewer, you'd hear terms like vision conflict and a lack of symbiotic vision. If you're listening to a couple IT folks trading stories over adult beverages, the term micro-managing control freak might sneak into the conversation. The boss stopped listening to anybody else. Simple as that.
I spent nearly two years in the SEO grey-hat world, and even though I was astonishingly successful at it (with the Google ranks to prove it) the simple fact is I hated the work.
I hated convoluting user interface for robot food. I hated corrupting file structures just to become search engine magnets. And I really hated torturing English just to get the keyword density right.
Don't get me wrong. I build search engine recognition into every site I do. My objection comes with the spamming, the trickery, the gamemanship of manipulating pages for top results.
In striving for a balance between human effectiveness and Top 10 Ranking Success, I had two big victories.
One keyword-dominant site had a 70 percent home page bailout rate because it was so spammy; by the time I was done that failure rate had been cut in half with no damage to the search engine standings. In the second case, I had a 180-degree difference with the owner on the marketing approach, but like I said earlier, the client always gets what they want. After the site rang up zero sales in the first 5,000 visitors, he let me redo it my way.
And last time I heard, it was doing $100,000 a month.
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