@neilmiddleton

These days, it’s impossible to move more than about 20 feet before you get someone trying to sell you some search engine optimisation services of some kind or another.  Funnily enough they do this via direct selling rather letting you find them on Google, but generally speaking they make the same promises:

1. They’ll get you to the fabled number one slot on Google
2. They’ll double your traffic

However, they never tend to promise the one thing that you, as a website owner, really want … return on investment.

For instance, let’s say you’re paying a SEO “Expert” to help with your site.  What would you like to see?  10 million hits a day?  The number 1 slot on Google?  More income?

Exactly, whilst traffic is nice from a vanity point of view, it ultimately costs you money in bandwidth and beefier servers.  Only sales conversions generate you true income and I believe this is how all SEO experts should be measured.

Which would you prefer:  10,000 customers who never buy anything, or five who do?

Over time I would like to see SEO Experts moving to charging on a results based model, i.e. the more money you make you via your website, the more they get paid.  If they don’t increase your ROI (i.e do their work properly), they don’t get paid – simple.

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Back when I started out in web development it was simple.  You built websites with HTML, used a very light sprinkling of JavaScript, used CSS if you were doing something cutting-edge, and wrote your backend in Perl.

These days, it a whole load more difficult.  There’s a very wide array technologies available, both backend and front, for all sorts of uses, all competing with each other.  These include browser plugins, compiled languages, statics languages, scripting engines, graphics tools and more.  Flash, Silverlight, HTML5, Rails, .NET, PHP, Canvas, SVG amongst others are all vying for your attention.

So, how do you choose what you want to build your next application in?

Well, chances are you’re already skilled in something, and that’s probably your first choice, but being a web developer means you have a tendency to want to build stuff that’s cutting edge (bleeding edge maybe), something that will attract attention, and something that will show how 733t you are.

Stop.

Unless you’re burning your own money instead of a clients, what you need is something that meets four simple criteria – tried, tested, proven and reliable.

Developers need to remember that at the end of the day, what they are doing has a cost be it time-based or otherwise.  If you’re a client, you want to know that what you’re paying for is going to work, and going to work well.  If it doesn’t, clients get grumpy.

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