Nick Garner - UK SEO / Online PR

Simple quesiton. 

You want to buy some software. Who do you believe?

THIS? 

A 1 star rating and 220 reviewers saying how they are disgusted with how intuit have finally made enemies of them.

I have used TurboTax for many years, but not any more.

Turbo is clunky and inelegant, but up to 2007 you could use it to do several returns. The 2008 version does not permit you to do that. Plus, Intuit has become more and more insistently intrusive.
This is a good year to try a competitor’s product.

Intuit has been edging closer and closer to the edge of the cliff for years with the way they treat their customers… and now they’ve gone over the edge with the higher price and the hidden terms about a limit to one return. There was already a huge price increase last year when e-file suddenly cost a lot more money. The year before that, they forced me to use Deluxe because the feature set of the basic version was downgraded.

the offending product on Amazon

OR THIS:

 http://turbotax.intuit.com/

This whole story demonstrates why: 
a. User feedback is critcal for making good buying decisions

b. The internet is one giant conversation

c. greedy corporates who don’t get a + b and peddle substandard services and products deserve what they get in this age of the ‘conversation’

Linkbuilding

Luckily I get loads of spammy requests for link exchanges. Why lucky? because one of the big sites I look after is that prominent, its a magnet for link builders. 

And we got that way by having a great site, with content that is genuinely useful and then mixed it in with some ‘robust’, but sustainable linkbuilding practices. 

Anyhow this useful and comprehensive article echoes my views on linkbuilding…

http://www.saadkamal.com/featured/link-building-a-complete-walkthrough/

Like a lot of geeky types, I’m interested in UFO’s - and why not I hear you say!

So for my UFO entertainment fix I have subscribed to Acebryan7ox.

Today I find he has been removed from youtube… and he is not the only one apparently

• acebryan,
• nightfallproject,
• rodneykingman,
• teabowbraine,
• realeducation,
• vormeggio,
• mayorofcydae,
• wildtonic
• heartofdrakn
• NafrikaKorps

These are only a portion of the 20 or so big names taken offline. And I must say how disappointed I am about this. I always figured youtube was a place where you could trust for allowing account holder to more or less do their thing (except for obscenity and copyright infringement)

Of course being part of Google (an evil company BTW) its going to be impossible to get straight answers. I do hope someone get an alternative site going so there is a counterpoint and a solid base from which ‘alternative’ views can be interacted with.

Bad, bad, bad

I was asked for my opinion on hiring a PPC agency…. so here were a few of the cirteria I would use to pick the right PPC company to work with !

The general things to think about are a combination of ‘likeability’ and efficiency. When I speak of nice people, I assume that people, like people, like themselves.

And that being the case you get more done and have more goodwill to help you through any tough times you both may have.

The efficiency stuff: 

PPC agency requirements

• Cost per hour or day of service
  • How do they account for this
  • If there is more work involved than expected, then how would this be accounted for
• Invoicing terms
  • Monthly?
  • How big is their credit line?
  • Gap between being invoiced and being paid – making sure cashflow is managed
• Consistency in service standards
  • How will these agreed standards be maintained
    • What are the mechanisms to track this?
• Quality of the people administering the account
  • GAP qualified? (google adwords professional qualified)
  • Years experience
  • Interest in what we do?
• Flexibility of the company
  • Account management structure
    • Do the people between the account expect and us know what they are talking about?
    • Can they translate our wishes properly (We give a brief - do they understand it?))
    • Do we have clear access to the execs?
• Expertise in this sector
  • As a business have they managed accounts this size
  • What case studies can they present
• Assurances on consistency of personnel
  • What contractual elements can we have to make sure the personnel we ‘buy’ are the ones we keep on the account
  • If these people leave, what arrangements do we have to replace them with appropriate people
• Bid management / general technology they use
  • How do they see this tech working in our circumstances?
  • What will this cost be and what savings has this tech given with other clients
• Reporting
  • Examples of client reporting
    • What analysis
    • How robust is the data
    • Tags ? which ones?
• Access to accounts
  • Can we? – we don’t like ‘black box’ so access here is important
• Contractual stuff
  • How long?
  • What is its broken by us – penalties?
  • What liability on their part if they mess up? i.e. they mess up some max cost per click figures and burn a load of money
  • Can some of the things we want be incorporated? I.E. pick of certain execs?