Current state of SEO and what clients need to know

What Clients Need to Know about the Current State of SEO

A friend on LinkedIn, Chris Abraham, was musing about how SEO is evolving. He said some SEOs now proclaim that you must remove all meta tags from HTML. This is ridiculous.

Google Webmaster is not saying that. Google gives a list of "meta tags we understand":

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en

Chris also said that many big SEO clients are re-writing their hobbled together websites to comply with new search engine algorithms and rules. Many websites of larger companies have been stitched together without much rhyme or reason, due to departmental feuds and time constraints.

It's good to re-write corporate fluff into engaging, customer-centric content.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141210172334-474636-your-competitors-are-doing-seo

I offered this comment:

Title and meta description and H tags are valid, but meta keywords tag should be empty. Fresh, original content that answers customer questions in an FAQ format is how to do SEO services now.  

The big challenge is convincing clients that: 

* new subpages need to be created for major keyword topics customers are doing searches on, but there is no corresponding webpage in the client's website

* each webpage must have a single H1 tag that identifies the main theme

* keyword ranking is dead (since the Not Provided change at Google)

* page level metrics is all we have now, so we start optimizing the pages that get the most traffic or have the best financial payoff value

* they need to have more definitions and explanations from the customer viewpoint (you-oriented conversation, not we-oriented fluff)

* they need to define Conversion Goals and track them through Google Analytics so they can see the ROI of SEO

* Schema.org structured markup microdata code is now mandatory for implementation in the HTML, though very time consuming to do so manually.

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