It used to be that they had to have the resources to hire me. The last couple clients I’ve had made me realize though that there’s more – they have to be willing to do some work themselves on their website weekly, or let me have more control to do the work, or they need to designate someone to do robust content updates.

Their successes are quite limited if they aren’t willing to change something every week. And now, I know to ask them and really dig deep to make sure they’re on board with creating new content constantly.

Your internal navigation and labeling systems should use the keyword phrases your target market is comfortable with, and a good site content inventory should be done to emphasize your most important pages in the root directory.

Thanks for the back and forth here! And your comments are why I inserted my two pence worth in the post itself. From a relationship building perspective, I think having the comments as “Follow” is better, but it does mean you have to be pretty ruthless about moderating comments. That’s been my philosophy up until now. It does mean I have fewer comments than other sites, but I think it’s worth the trade off.