Unlike other people in the SEO industry, I’m not in it for the flashy office address, new model car every year, or the latest in fashion; I’m definitely not doing it to increase my annual income by several hundred thousand a year.

I’m in the business of SEO quite honestly to receive a set income so I can live independent of any disability welfare, and although it may sound corny I’m in it for my clients, I want their websites to do the best they can.

The maximum number of clients that I work with is 10. This way I have time to work on all of their websites every week; I also have time to visit forums, to keep up on all the latest SEO news as there's  no use doing a whole lot of outdated stuff to my clients’ websites. Don’t forget the time for writing my blog. That's pretty much my life.

10 websites may not sound many, but my clients are thrilled. I have an online hourly rate, however since they pay me on a monthly basis; I do a lot more to these sites than I would a casual one off SEO job that requested a quick fix.

A bit of back scratching goes a long way. I am at the stage where I chose my clients carefully, not because I couldn’t do with the work, but I can now tell by the first couple of emails if a client will be hard to work with, who are really not worth the hassle.  I’d rather have 5 good clients than 10 difficult ones.

I don’t work on the same type of websites at the same time although I may work on a couple of similar themed websites if they belong to the same person. It would be easy to work on 10 websites with all the same theme and client base, just concentrating on different keywords; but where would be the fun in that! 

My goal with a website is to get it ranking well for as many different keywords as possible.

One site I have been working on and off for 4 years has over 1200 keywords and phrases that do well in search engines; I know this because the keywords were taken from keywords used to find the website over a one month period.

Another site I have been working on for just 9 months is optimized for over 700 keywords and phrases which customers used last month to find the site; with many of the keywords resulting in up to 50 or 60 people finding the site.

Most SEO’s concentrate on 5 or 10 keywords, which is all very well; however I have a client that came to me after working with this type of basic SEO. When I looked at the website statistics for this site: yes, the key phrases this site was optimized for were defiantly ranked at #1 but they were such obscure keywords, people just weren’t doing searches using them, making the optimization pretty much useless because it didn’t bring results; the site was not getting visitors.

By obscure I mean what's called long-tail key phrases, usually 5 words or more, which although some people may possibly search, it would be unlikely. An example of a long-tail key phrase that is unlikely to be searched for is “Swimwear Photos Shop San Diego”.  By taking out the word photo you now have a good search phrase “Swimwear Shop, San Diego”.  The searcher is asking for what they are looking for and where they want their search to be.

I have just finished two searches from New Zealand for fun, and let’s face it; a swimwear shop is going to have photos!  The first result had a very nice store, although the pages did open very slowly, and while they did have some SEO done on the pages it would be a piece of cake to take another website selling swimsuits in San Diego, and have them ranking #1 in many, many different searches.

The search for “Swimwear Photos Shop San Diego” actually returned photographers of swimwear rather than shops!

To summarize, I prefer to exceed expectations of 10 clients than provide an ‘adequate’ service to 30. It’s called job satisfaction!