A big part of the agency-client relationship when it comes to SEO involves expectations. This is because we need to make sure that our clients understand that search optimization requires a certain level of commitment and action that may not be found in other advertising initiatives. For example, someone who wants to design a print ad or direct mail piece often will spend time on approving the final product, which is created with the agency’s software and machinery. For SEO, the process is a bit different, given the client’s need to make sure changes happen on their end, which may require the involvement of a third-party web designer.

With SEO, expectations are a two-way street. Customers should expect that the requisite keyword research and content creation should be done within a reasonable length of time, and they should expect search engine rankings to take a certain amount of time. In the past couple of years, we have seen rankings rise faster than previously, since the periodic “Google Dance” has been replaced with continuous spidering and updates. Still, many initiatives like link building require search engines to visit other sites, cache the results, and then change their listings. On top of this, competitive sectors take more time and energy to get rankings.

A great deal of this timeline is dependent on the client’s ability to make the site into an SEO-friendly presence and fix code issues that prevent proper optimization. If a site can’t be read by search engine spiders, or has sections that are impossible for engines to properly classify, then it is going to take longer before rankings come into fruition. In many cases hidden issues like duplicate content and bad code also come into play, and this often creates problems for the client who may not have the budget to make wholesale site improvements. We have seen cases where clients got a customized content management system that was not upgradeable without expensive programming, so the SEO suffered as a result.

With most SEO projects, depending on the service level, a customer should expect a timely site audit, creation of optimized code plus content for a specific number of pages, advice on fixing potential issues, and ongoing reporting. Periodic monitoring also comes with reporting. At Web.com Search Agency, we generally encourage our customers to add Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools so they can get a free third-party report card on how people interact with their sites, and how their search engine traffic is improving. Active customers should also expect timely updates if search algorithms change to the extent that an improvement to their site is necessary.

Setting the right expectation for an SEO project generally pays off when a contract is up for renewal, since a satisfied customer is likely to stick around longer and consider expanding the amount of pages/topics that may have a better chance in the search engines. When customers and SEO contacts understand what is expected on their side, they are also able to communicate the critical nature of the project to webmasters or decision makers. Because there are so many different website platforms and models out there, just about every SEO job is a custom project that requires in-depth analysis and recommendations. Because each site is unique, different problems are likely to crop up. (If a site is not unique, then that is a problem too!) The ability to remove SEO roadblocks quickly and position a site for success can bring a higher level of satisfaction to the customer relationship, in addition to the revenue and traffic created by a successful initiative.

Duplicate content can still be tough to deal with when you’re trying to optimize a website. Search engines may be reading several pages with substantially similar content, or “printer friendly” pages that generally contain the most important information on a page. They may also be seeing several versions of the same page, and (even in 2010) may be confused by the page at www.example.com vs. the one at example.com without the www. On top of that, someone else may be mirroring your content on another site, or pointing to your hosting address, and a search engine can index new content on that site before it ever reads yours.

Canonical tags, also known as canonical link elements, are one way to help straighten things out. They have been covered in a previous post, but in this case they can be a lifesaver when dealing with all the strange things that a search engine can do when it tries to figure out which pages to index and where.

For starters, it pays to have a self-referencing tag on each page of your site. If you prefer the www version of your site, then you should reference that in the tag itself. Even though it may seem redundant and unnecessary for pages to reference themselves with a canonical link element, the value of this approach pays off in cases where URLs are appended with tracking data, or other sites point to yours. In one case, we saw a company that had a collection of domain names based on common misspellings of their brand name. Each domain pointed to the main site (instead of 301 redirecting) and this was creating a hodgepodge of indexed pages. Since a canonical link element references the “true” URL, a search engine does not need to be confused, whether the domain in question is yours or not.

Duplicate content from printer friendly pages should be handled a bit differently, since you are basically referencing the actual page on the link element for the printer friendly one. Most webmasters handle printer friendly pages by segregating them in a directory of their own which is then disallowed by the robots.txt file. However, people sometimes link to printer-friendly pages, so it pays to tell the search engine where the spiderable content exists. There is also a belief in the SEO community that a canonical link element works like a “mini 301 redirect” so if this is true it makes sense to include this tag on any page that is duplicating content from elsewhere on your own site. Because these tags work across websites, you may also include the tag on pages that get syndicated or copied elsewhere.

The fight against duplicate content is an important one for any webmaster, since there are so many ways to inadvertently copy your own information elsewhere, even without having to deal with plagiarism and wholesale copying by competitors and scraper sites. Preventing and controlling content for a search engine also gives you site a more unified profile in the engines, and can be a distinct advantage when your content is stacked up against other sites which may have other factors in their favor, but aren’t organized in a way that a search engine can understand.