SEO is a natural effort by which traffic is a by-product. If it’s not a natural part of your next post’s planning or something you can easily visit doing a page audit on your site, then it’s too complex and you’re overshooting your optimum effort-to-reward target.

If you have any questions or topics you’d like addressed after the slides are posted, along with my speaking notes, then post them in the comments and we’ll start a discussion.

Here is a link to the presentation below: SEO Still Matters

The 10 Commandments of business

1. Respond to initial inquiries quickly. The number of projects I’ve landed because I was the first (and sometimes only) person to respond is too great to guess at this point. Hundreds. Some people don’t even reply to perfectly good requests.
2. Don’t give away the goose. When you’re doing an initial quote, proposal, or call, don’t tell them everything you’re going to do – they just might find someone in India to do your plan for $300 – at least charge for your time if you’re going to give that much info away.
3. Charge how much you need to make ends meet. A sure-fire way to fail in business to to charge such low rates that you can’t pay your bills. If you need help with pricing, I’m available for coaching on this, along with many other areas of running your business.
4. Under-promise and over-deliver. Few things will cause you more work dealing with frustrated clients than over-promising and under-delivering. Sure, timelines can slip, but be open and proactive when they do.
5. Don’t make it too easy for people to grab your attention through your site. I’ve recently seen a few of my fellow Genesis developer friends tweet that they were taking their phone numbers off their websites. I was shocked that they were published in the first place, but most people are more extroverted than I am. It comes down to adding layers of contact processes for vetting potential clients. See my Contact page.
6. Do what you say you’ll do. When you say you’ll do something, do it. If things start to unravel, reach out to those affected by an issue.
7. Do no harm. This is a big one for me. I get a boatload of bad ideas and preconceived notions coming at my via contact form for what people want on their website that should never, ever happen. As a quality dev, it is your job to educate people and help save them from a bad choice. I at least make them insist twice and then inform them that their work will not appear in my portfolio.
8. KISS. “Keep it simple stupid” is a phrase from WWII and are words to live by when it comes to site organization and design. Visitors don’t want to think, so don’t confuse them with a crazy homepage.
9. Clear communication. I’ve never used contracts before. Before this week, that is. It’s more of a “what to expect” and “here’s how we’re going to handle payment” agreement, but it really clears the air for what is to come and who is responsible for what.
10. Ask for referrals. When you finish a project, ask for a referral from your extremely happy client. Chances are, they know someone who could use a good website and you’re just the person to do it.

There’s a lot more to write on the subject, but I hope you find these to guide you to the next level of doing business with great success.

That is why people like me have a nearly-endless market of professionals of other industries needing my industry’s skills to make their vision happen.

A lifetime of learning

While it takes thousands of hours to learn a craft to the point of being both proficient and efficient, there are some simple things that the average person can handle once they are shown the tools to use and some instructions on how to use them. For those people, this should help them along the way with simple tasks.

A recap of the tools

In case you didn’t click the link in the previous paragraph, here is what you absolutely need:

First, either Chrome or Firefox web browsers. In them is a feature when you right-click an element on the screen that says “Inspect Element” in the right-click context menu (yours will likely look different based on OS and browser plugins that alter the context menu).

This will bring up a frame inside the browser window that shows you both the generated HTML of the page and the CSS code all the way down the system of CSS files that each element uses to generate how it looks and behaves (upon hover, click, etc.).

Second, you need a text editor. Any editor (even TextEdit or Notepad) will do, but there are syntax highlighting editors that color different syntax in the language you’re typing in (usually just CSS, PHP, HTML, and JS). Those would be Sublime Text, skEdit, TextMate, or Notepad++.

Third, you need to stop using your hosting cPanel, Plesk, or other control panel to go to the file manager or FTP add-on screen in the browser. People who edit files on the server should use an FTP client. I’m a Mac guy, so I use Transmit 4 (one of the best $30 I spent on my Mac software library) and there are a few good options for Windows. This will let you navigate to the theme folder on your host and directly open a file so when you save it, it loads the update to the server and you can refresh the browser – more importantly, it lets you undo a mistake and go back many steps in history to recover a from a string of mistakes.

What are some basics?

The questions that are most easily addressed in a general post like this are CSS issues. These are typically questions about the appearance, spacing, alignment, or other visual cues. Sometimes something can be handled with either CSS or PHP, such as having something not appear on certain pages, like single posts. Let’s look at the CSS items first.

CSS

It’s a rather simple syntax to get the hang of the majority of layout and appearance items necessary to wireframe a site or change up the text appearance on a site pretty significantly. With the exception of adding Google Webfonts to a child theme via the functions.php file, 98% of font edits will be done in CSS. Here are some common attributes and links to their use:

PHP

PHP is more of a programming language than CSS, which is just syntax that can do some neat stuff. With PHP, you can add information to the database, connect to remote services, jump in and out of HTML syntax, and construct new plugins and themes. It is the backbone of WordPress. Here is what PHP looks like for one of the child theme’s functions.php file:

There are two main places to look for how to change something that doesn’t look like it’s a CSS edit: functions.php and the page template being used (home.php, page_landing.php, etc.). Once in there, the themes are documented well enough that you should be able to find what you’re looking for and try to alter or remove code.

This is how the majority of us learned PHP – by breaking hundreds of things and learning from those mistakes. You WILL break things and you WILL get frustrated. It’s best to learn on a development install rather than your live site, but working with real-world situations makes you very strong in what you learn.

I’ve been Rickrolled myself a number of times and it’s annoying as heck when my headphones are jacked to the max… on MY OWN site!

Here’s how:

1. Download Stealth Login Page from the repository or directly in your dashboard.
2. Activate the plugin.
3. Click the Settings link to set up the Rickroll.
4. Once on the settings page, enter http://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?t=2m6s as the URL for the redirect.
5. Enter your answer and question phrases.
6. Be sure to e-mail yourself the new login URL so you can always get back in without getting Rickrolled.
7. Click the Save Settings button.

Now go Rickroll some bad dudes.

I was contacted by a Chicago businessman who had some bad press back in 2011. He said that those affected had apparently made it a hobby to keep the press at the top of Google results for his vanity namesake search. It certainly appeared to be true, because I knew about the bad press before our appointed consultation call because it was front and center right below his LinkedIn profile.

I’m by far, unequivocally not so, an SEO expert. I only know the basics – probably enough to be dangerous, but I’ve had pretty good success in past years and project using Scribe SEO, so I told him that it would take some time, effort, and consistent blog posts and multiple social network profiles to push that down below his actual intellectual property and profiles.

Boy was I wrong!

It didn’t take much time and barely any effort. Scribe SEO makes it what I call “stupid easy” to fill in the SEO fields (especially in Genesis themes) and maximize the SEO impact to the writing you already produce. It’s not too difficult to come up with a plan to focus on what you want traffic for and follow Scribe’s suggestions to get there.

The site was still behind a request to block Google bots until it was live on his domain on April 26th. Production had started just that Monday on the 22nd. On April 27th, the robots.txt message was gone from search results and it went from 5th to 3rd in the search results.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t do a little happy dance over such a quick result for my efforts to serve my client well. Happy happy happy. That’s a good old win-win-win right there, baby!

But wait! There’s more!

I had a moment to pause and think about things – just a moment or two – and I decided to do another vanity search for him. Today, April 30th, the site is now the 2nd site  in the SERP (search engine results page) and I will be sure to update this when it overtakes his LinkedIn profile in the results.

I can’t stress enough that I’m not an expert and I don’t even mention SEO on my Services page at all – because I don’t necessarily want that kind of project. Scribe SEO makes it that easy to get these kinds of results.

This was a result from a brand new site that didn’t exist before the 19th and didn’t have Scribe SEO installed until the 22nd. I couldn’t be more pleased with such immediate results.

If you are scared to death to spend $1200 on an expert who doesn’t help your rankings and would like to learn the basics and do enough to see results, then you really should try it out, at least for a month while you learn. Don’t blame me if you like it so much you don’t ever want to publish another post without it.

You can grab a copy of my slides or just flip through them on my SpeakerDeck page: http://speakerdeck.com/jpetersen/wordsesh-2013

Key Points

• Always be honest.
• Care about your clients.
• Sell benefits, not features.
• Compete on value, not price.
• Skill > Speed
• Integrity > Skill

This week I got tapped for my first two WordPress speaking engagements. The first one is WordSesh 2013 coming up this Saturday, April 13th at 10:00 UTC (that’s 6:00am for us U.S. Americans). I’ll be presenting “Building Greater Profits into Your WordPress Business.”

The great thing about this, our WordPress community, is that, while there is always going to be someone (or hundreds) of people who know more about something than any single individual, we all bring something unique to the table. That said, it’s my hope that I validate some things you are doing right, shine some light on some areas you maybe hadn’t thought of before – or things you just haven’t had the courage to do or say – and I’ll be available for ongoing discussions long after the presentation.

I’ll be spending time preparing for Saturday and writing about the process afterward for the benefit of those who are asked to present some day and are curious or concerned about how to prepare and present. I’ve said it many times on Twitter: I’m an open book – I don’t have any trade secrets to do what I do.

On Monday I also released Stealth Login Page plugin and it’s nearly up to 600 downloads in its first week, so thank you all for all the positive feedback. Read more here or go check it out at the repository.

Starting your business is very similar

If you haven’t already quit your job, start small and make your mistakes while you still have a good safety net to fall back on when someone doesn’t pay or you underestimate a quote. I recommend Jon Acuff’s book, Quitter if you’re looking to quit sometime soon to do your own thing.

Figure out how much you want (or need) to make, divide that by the number of hours you can work, and then how many hours of that you can bill for. If you’re doing project pricing, reverse the steps after calculating your need: how long will it take you to do the project and then price according to how much you need to charge over that time. Set up milestones for cash flow if you need to.

An example

I recently sought help for feeling stuck and unable to concentrate on my voluminous list of projects and to-do items. The advice I got back was to cast out thoughts of how productive I usually am and make a daily to-do of no more than 3 items with the 3rd item considered to be a bonus task – if I get to it, great.

Last week, I set out to convert the brilliant code @norcross handed me to redirect login attempts on a WordPress site and turn that code into a plugin that will work for all themes, not just a fix coded into a client’s theme, if needed.

I’ve only written one plugin, and the vast majority of that was done by other friends with experience. This time I wanted to write it. I watched tutorials, practiced for a few hours with things not working and error screens until I got it working. I went step by step with each file to break it down into the readme file, the plugin file, and settings. I broke each of those up into tasks, too. Adding a settings page to the dashboard menu, plugging in the actual function, designing the settings form, etc.

Now, it’s live in the repository and it’s being well-received by the community. I couldn’t have done it if I didn’t break it down into baby steps – Sunday, I finished eating my elephant.

On to my next large herbivore.

What are you breaking down into chunks to achieve? How can I be of assistance?

The natural solution is to block the login screen. Unfortunately, in this case, blocking the IP address in the .htaccess file won’t help any because that is my client’s IP address. Like usual, I posed the situation to my Twitter crowd and got an elegant solution in minutes from @norcross – seriously, if you’re not following Andrew Norcross, you are missing out.

Place the following code in your theme’s (or child theme’s) functions.php file and find/replace each “question” and each “answer” with your own words. It’s safe to assume that this will block 99.999999999% of attempts to access your login page since bots don’t look for such addresses and it adds an additional wall to break through. If you’ve got excellent hosting with proper permissions and firewalls, this locks your dashboard down – hard. To read more about the various types of hosting, check out my page on hosting.

/*
* Check the URL of the WordPress login
* page for a specific query string
*
* assumes login string is
* http://www.your-site.com/wp-login.php?question=answer
*/
add_action( 'login_init', 'login_stringcheck' );
function login_stringcheck() {

     // set the location a failed attempt goes to
     $redirect = 'http://www.google.com/';

     // missing query string all together
     if (!isset ($_GET['question']) )
          wp_redirect( esc_url_raw ($redirect), 302 );

     // incorrect value for query string
     if ($_GET['question'] !== 'answer' )
          wp_redirect( esc_url_raw ($redirect), 302 );

}

I’ve got a lot of thoughts on that and what to do about it — some of you know I am working on, and I’ll announce it widely soon. (I should probably at least tell my parents first.) Then I was reflecting on a chat I had with Jared Atchison last week month he said that people in our position don’t last very long. He’s right. If they need benefits, can’t weather the ups and downs because they suck at managing a business, or they suck at client interactions, then they go to an employer with a position that more or less makes them happy.

To be clear, I won’t fault anyone for taking a job to do what’s best for their family – some of my best WordPress developer friends have quit being a small fish in a big pond and taken jobs, even just last week in one case. It’s a personal decision – I’m here to encourage those who are at the 10-40 client mark and have a lot of volatility. Some people benefit from joining a team to enhance their careers that would otherwise be an uphill battle alone – programmers and designers alike. Three of my favorite people have joined teams for that purpose.

Heck, I’ve almost thrown in the towel twice. Both times I was broke and desperate, but I couldn’t shake the shame I’d place on myself for “failing” by my standards and would never be happy making in a week what I often made in a day or less. I was tempted to go back to my old employer with great benefits, but I don’t fit under management very well because there are precious few true leaders in those positions, so if you have a great leader at the helm, then you’re very blessed. I’m a rebel and enough of a visionary that I can’t be molded like that.

The million dollar question

What is your lifestyle worth? By that, I’m asking, “what price would have to be paid by an employer to quit what you’re doing?” We all have a price. What’s yours? You can no longer decide you don’t feel well enough to get up at the crack of dawn hour and sleep in until 8am. Traffic sucks, and now you actually have to get dressed to go to work. You have one, two, or maybe even 5 people making the decisions to hire and fire and if one of them has you in their cross-hairs, you’re gone. Jobless. Again. Feeling worthless because someone didn’t value you enough to keep paying you a pittance.

My answer might shock you

I’ve come up with a price. I’ve had it ever since I had more than 50 regular clients paying me every month, quarter, and year in many varying amounts. I’m now at 180 clients on a regular basis and many of them pay me monthly or annually with newcomers and redesigns being larger ticket items. I’d have to be fired by over 100 individuals and most new inquiries in order to be in that prior scenario

My price is $1,000,000 per year. Note, that’s not what I earn each year (yet /grin) but what the price of the risk of putting all of my eggs into one basket that can be crushed at a moment’s notice. It’s unlikely that I would add $1M to an employer’s bottom line in my first year to make up for my salary and benefits overhead, so it’d be for a long-term goal. That said, I’m very happy to do what I do now and would do it for free if that was realistic – which it’s not – and it would take something very grand to pull me away from this. Why would I want to put all I’ve worked for in jeopardy for a salary that can be cut off like the electricity? My purpose and passion extend beyond what happens 9-5 M-F in our office above the garage.

Do epic stuff

You don’t have to make a million dollars per year or have 50k Twitter followers to do something epic. I’m just an ordinary guy doing ordinary stuff extraordinarily well. It’s making a difference to those people I work with. My friend Steve Farber has a saying,

“Do what you love in service of those who love what  you do.”

Being a servant leader and serving your clients is not below you. Instead, it will propel you to new heights.