Working as a web designer, SEO and copywriter over the years, I’ve come to believe firmly in good fits for specific projects. Find a firm that is in alignment with your company values, quickly grasps your company voice and shares your beliefs that the promotion of your business will really be a benefit to some group of people and I think you’re more likely to end up with a presentation of your business that has real heart and soul than if you simply pick any old firm because the price is right, they live near you or some other relatively meaningless quality.

I can usually tell within the first 10 minutes of speaking to a business owner whether my firm is really going to gel with their needs. I find we’ve become quick to turn down projects that we don’t think we’re the best match for, frequently referring those businesses to colleagues who may have special interests or talents that I believe will form a more perfect union between business owner vision and web services company vision.

What is especially interesting to me is that, sometimes, we will decide to take a client on because of an initial sense of our being a strong match for their business, and then, as the relationship grows over time, we come to discern more and more qualities about the business that make us admire what they are doing.

A Valued Client
Such has been the case with our client, Emerson Creek Pottery. We’ve been working with them for about 5 years now. While I initially took a shine to bringing them on board as a client because I thought their pottery was beautiful and liked the fact that it was made in the USA, over the years, I have discovered further gem-like qualities about this company that have made both our relationship with them and our appreciation for what they do unfold and blossom like the petals of a flower. The better we got to know the company, the more we discovered that our own interests and values align with theirs.

This has created a working relationship that is trusting, easy and limitless in creative possibilities. A real dream come true!

Three of the things about this Virgnia-based pottery house that have come to impress me most are:

1. They are one of America’s last commercial pottery companies. Chances are, if you are shopping for new dishes at one of the big box stores or even at specialty shops, they will come primarily from China. There is little or no oversight to protect you from these products being contaminated with lead, and if you’re choosing plastic, science has known for decades that combining plastic with hot food is seriously bad for your health.

America’s Native Peoples used clay to make stunning and useful pottery for many thousands of years. When Colonial immigrants arrived on these shores, they quickly realized they would have to set up potteries if they were to avoid the time and taxation involved in getting housewares shipped over from Europe. A number of great pottery houses emerged out of this need, but as America moved into the age of convenience and global trade, American-made wares were quickly replaced by cheap imports – often with zero regard for safety.

I really love the fact that Emerson Creek Pottery has kept the Colonial tradition alive of creating safe ceramics on American soil. There are very few commercial companies doing this in the 21st century.

2. Emerson Creek Pottery qualifies as a green business in such a meaningful way. Their pottery is made by human hands. When humans do the work, instead of machines, pollution is greatly reduced. And, Americans are being employed with dignity by this activity. When you purchase those box store dishes, you have no way of knowing how the workers who ran the machines are being treated – whether fairly or as sweat shop drudges. I really appreciate the domestic, human-based nature of my client’s business and they have taken a number of steps beyond this to be green.

3. Finally, I find it very exciting to work with a business that regularly creates new products that have the potential to make life a little simpler or saner for people. I love getting to create new pages and new copy for a company that has so much to offer anybody who is looking for safe household items.

On that note, I am feeling really proud today of the potters’ latest offering – sets of safe baby dishes. Like all of their pottery, these are lead-free and are going to be a boon to anyone attempting to raise a plastic-free baby or child. They are such basic, functional pieces…really sane choices for a natural baby. And, they are very charmingly handpainted.

Emerson Creek Pottery owner, Jim Leavitt, sent his children to Montessori schools – an educational system that frowns on giving kids phony substitute objects when they tend to be so much happier with the real thing. This new line of pottery has given me a new reason to be glad I chose to work with this client years ago. I respect any company that thinks children deserve real goods and especially respect the fact that these baby dishes are going to help parents protect their kids from toxic plastics and lead poisoning. Who wouldn’t cheer for that?

To be succinct – this is a company I can really groove with.

What Kind Of Groove Are We In?

Things really hum around the office of Solas Web Design when we are working on a project we have a great feeling for. Picture us in a sunlit space or a moonlit room at the computers, surrounded by our ever-expanding organic farm, nodding our heads in time to the beat of your company’s heart.

If you are doing something green, something organic, something domestic, something local, something family-friendly, something humanitarian, spiritual, handcrafted, creative, mom-business, dad-business, big or small family business…anything that’s really going to benefit the people that we can help you reach, you can expect an exceptional level of comprehension and work from us. Give us the opportunity to get into the groove of your business, and we’ll become a part of your company that you’ll be saying you couldn’t do without. We’d like to hear from you.

When I visit a blog for the first time, if it looks even remotely interesting to me, I subscribe to its RSS feed with the plan of reading articles the blog publishes for awhile to see if I like what the blogger is doing. Maybe other blog readers set the bar higher initially, and don’t subscribe until they’ve had multiple positive experiences with a blog before adding it to their feedreader. I’m not sure, but if the overall topic of a blog is important to me (local search, copywriting, SEO, usability, humanitarian issues) I’m quite willing to give the blogger the benefit of the doubt and a chance to engage me as a loyal reader.

Then, every few months, I go through my Bloglines account and delete those feeds that lead me to blogs that have failed to engage me for a protracted period of time. I’ve started to see some patterns in why I hit delete and this is my list of most common reasons why I typically unsubscribe to blogs.

Comment Neglect
This is something I have witnessed both on new blogs and on very popular ones as well. A blogger writes a great post that evokes a response from readers who then comment. And then the comments are totally neglected by the blogger. He doesn’t bother to respond. I know, on blogs that receive vast numbers of comments, it’s not realistic to expect the blogger to respond to each and every one of his reader’s comments, but hey, if you write a post that get 3, 5, 10 comments and you just ignore them all, what is the point of you having people comment at all?

I have left remarks, asked questions, praised and condemned and received zero response from authors. If this happens once or twice, I don’t really care, but if this is the blogger’s habitual attitude toward the readers who have taken the time to attempt to converse, then there is no point, really, in attempting to participate. I feel that the blogger doesn’t really care about what he is doing, and I am left with an apathetic feeling about his writing. I hit delete.

It’s my feeling that if you enable comments on your posts, it’s only civil to respond when people comment. If you are just too busy to acknowledge your readers, then maybe you shouldn’t be blogging.

Personal Neglect
Some people live in a world of big shots and…for lack of a better term…little shots. They would be too shy, too overawed, too nervous to write directly to a ‘big shot’ blogger even if a post has really gotten their attention in a special way. Sometimes, someone writes something that is so great, I want to reach out to them personally and commend them, ask questions, introduce myself, get to know them a bit better and, essentially, give a special recognition to the fact that something they have written has really struck me as exceptionally good or important.

On several occasions, I have received no reply from the blogger after taking the time to find their address, write to them, introduce myself, etc. When this has happened, I feel a bit puzzled and wonder if maybe their email account blocked my address as unknown, wonder if they went on vacation, are really, really busy, are sick, are lying wounded in a ditch somewhere. You get the idea…I make excuses for them because, to be honest, I feel some kind of instinctual embarrassment when I make a friendly overture to someone who then does not respond at all.

So, if I love this person’s writing, perhaps I continue to loyally read their work. Their writing comes off as so genuine, so informative, so worthy of my time. A few months or a year goes by, and they write something else that excites me so much, I send them another email, filled with my interest in them and their work. By this point, I may have forgotten that I tried to speak to them once before to no avail. But when, again, I receive no reply to my kind epistle, I tend to remember. I say, “Oh, this is the guy/gal who didn’t respond to me that other time. They must be too much of a big shot to be courteous or interested in a non-big-shot like me.”

After a couple of experiences like this with the same blogger, I find I can no longer read their work without associating that negative personal feeling with it. I actually feel a bit humiliated for awhile when I think of it, and then I write them off as probably not worth worrying about. And, I delete their feed from my feedreader.

It’s weird when this happens with people who seem to live near the center of the industry spotlight. You come across their work everywhere you go. I’ve even had well-known bloggers who have ignored me later email me to sell me their products or get me to vote for something they’ve written in an SM platform. I feel embarrassed, at that point, for them. They have no idea, I suppose, how phony they appear to me doing this. As I sit there reading their ‘friendly’ appeal for my business or vote, I have to realize that, yes, indeed, they’ve got my email address in their database because I wrote to them. Those emails they never troubled themselves to respond to. Ugh. So uncomfortable.

Beyond This
Some people have pet peeves with blogs that are updated too infrequently. This doesn’t actually bother me that much. Several of my favorite bloggers only post once or twice a month, but I still read everything they write (you know who you are!). Quality counts more than quantity with me. Other people don’t like blogs that disagree with their own beliefs or business views. Personally, I benefit from encountering a wide variety of people and opinions. Sometimes, after giving a blog a trial run, I find the content simply doesn’t interest me enough and I notice that my feedreader has 100 unread posts in it from that source. Time to move on with no hard feelings.

Hard feelings, for me, come when bloggers ignore what is, ostensibly, the goal of the blogging format: to write interactively. Newspapers have lately attempted to mimic the blogging format by enabling comments on news pieces. But I have never yet seen a single journalist return to a piece he has written and respond to those comments. Maybe they do in papers I don’t read, or maybe they think the comments are there so that community can build itself without oversight, moderation or participation from the author of the pieces the public is reacting to. It’s rather fuzzy what the point of it is, but real blogging clearly has the point of interactivity between author and readers and to see that ignored in the face of comments being enabled really does bug me. To see great questions go unanswered, kind remarks go unacknowledged, opposing views go unobserved strikes me as a tremendous waste of opportunity.

And on the personal side, if a blogger’s writing inspires the people who read it, I just don’t think it cuts it anymore to hide behind an aura of being too big of a superstar to respond to readers who reach out to say, “hello, I admire your work. I have some questions.”

I’ve had real famous people (well-known authors, CEOs, scientists, etc.) respond with genuine, personable interest to my attempts to converse with them. Dedicated people seem to share a quality of being always interested in talking about their subject with others who share their interests or concerns. The acquaintances and friendships I’ve formed with real famous people have thrown an unappealing light on bloggers who have attained the heights of a few hundred or thousand subscribers and have subsequently lost their manners.

You just never know how those things are going to play out. The stranger who writes you a note about your blog and tells you he’s working on becoming a full-time SEO could turn out to be one of the most gifted new people in your industry. Or even just the nicest. If you neglect even the most basic of good manners in returning his greeting or wishing him good luck, who knows what you may lose? Maybe future work. Maybe your reputation as a good guy. Maybe a degree of your own self-respect.

All of us are busy. I have tasks to fill every hour of my day. I hope I’ve never been too busy, though, to meet good will with good will. As a blogger, I think it’s my responsibility to foster a pleasant atmosphere in which all can speak, all can learn, all can participate. Equality is good for business and our relationships with everyone. Don’t you agree?

Our chum, David Mihm, very rightly observes that Yellow Pages and Bologna SEO companies capture customers by dint of their simplicity. Buy the biggest YP ad, get the most phone calls. Buy into the idea that submitting your website to Google means success on the web and you’re spared the challenge of any learning curve. While Yellow Pages advertising is certainly a legitimate and aboveboard marketing option, signing up with a spurious SEO company and being duped by their silly to-do list represents lost time, lost income and lost learning opportunities for the small business owner.

As David points out, the trouble with legitimate SEO is that it can be a somewhat nuanced process, takes time and has no simple guarantees. The fishy SEO has a script he is reading over the phone to the prospective client – a script that pares SEO down to 4 or 5 ‘simple’, ‘guaranteed’ steps. Generally, by the time the client realizes that these steps brought no results for them, the sale has long been made and the SEO is either long gone or has some second surefire pitch to make in order to squeeze further money out of the business owner. It’s a nasty but successful business plan.

And where does it leave the qualified SEO firm? Frankly, it leaves them waiting for that sadder but wiser business owner to wend his way eventually to them, having learned the hard way that meta tags do not a successful website make.

And, yet, sometimes we can engage those clients the first time around, saving them from headaches they don’t even dream of and correctly setting their expectations for the hard work ultimate success will require on both our parts. And, we can take a cue from David’s article by coming up with our own simplest method of explaining the basics of a sound web effort to prospective clients. We need to give small business owners truths that they can really sink their teeth into.

So, here it is, David!

The Simple SEO Cake Recipe

Ingredients:

1 C. Solid Business Idea
1 C. Astute Market Research
1 C. SE-Friendly, Usable, Research-Based Design
1 C. Best Copywriting
1/2 C. Unique Ingredients Not Found In Competitor’s Cakes

Mix well to form a smooth, lump-free batter. When the batter is ready to launch put in the oven to bake. While you wait for it to rise, turn up the heat by:

• Opening kitchen door and shouting a running commentary on the process out to your neighbors – that will get them talking about your cake!
• Going to your neighbors’ houses and chatting with them about their own cakes, cakes in general and your cake.
• Calling, emailing and visiting prominent neighborhood citizens in hopes that they will take an interest in your cake. Be sure to praise their cakes lavishly!
• Participating in any baking clubs and conversations you can find

Now that you’ve created such a stir about your cake, remove from oven and serve.

Carefully watch the reactions of all your guests as they sample your cake. Did someone spit it out, set their fork down and turn away? Find out why and adjust recipe accordingly. Ask even satisfied tasters if there is anything you can do to improve your cake. Keep working at it. It takes practice and time to become a master baker and the art of perfectly pleasing people is what it’s all about.

Is my SEO Cake Recipe missing any ingredients or steps? You tell me!

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Photo Credits to 427 and Kendiala