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Ahhh Switch it off Looks like a 1000 other cheesy SEO websites

You seem to know your stuff, I'd stick with your current approach and become known on places like forums as someone who knows what they are talking about

Seems like a very fair mail, I Like the bit about "I'm busy myself for a few months".

Like you say, everyone runs their business differently, there really are some odd people about though

Must admit, I'm with Barney on this, having just been burnt again! I genuinely don't know what it is with the SEO industry, it seems to be full of shiny suits and people that say "yes we can", but in reality, no you cant

What I'm slowly realising (and I'm talking about big SEO houses) is that they just can't deliver. They have to nail you to an 12 month contract to pay for the salesmens suits. Hence why I'm simply going down the fixed price plus bonus if someone actually delivers...

(just in case he's reading, I'm not referring to Paul, our free lancer, who is actually doing all right )

I find the whole facebook strategy fascinating as there are so many different opinions.

Me personally, I don't think the actual FB fan page actually achieves too much, likewise its Google counterpart. Most of the traffic we get comes from posts or links on peoples walls.

It's just yet another thing that will never get updated, like neglected blogs...

But having the like button on your site is powerful. We average about 600- 700 likes per month on our UK directory, so that maybe 700 exit points, but also means 700 people are advertising us on their walls.

Looking at our analytics, in the last 30 days, we had 1,697 visitors from Facebook, of which GA reports 82.26% as new visits.

So we get a lot more traffic from FB than we send. It may not be a huge amount of traffic compared to a search engine, but for the sake of having a line of code on your pages, it's worth it

Must admit, I tend to blow hot and cold with all this cloud malarky.

When it goes wrong, it goes spectacularly wrong But have put a toe in the water and migrated our exchange server into the "cloud" and it's been pretty good. Still had a few minor outages, so not the bomb proof solution people keep going on about, but much less hassle than looking after the thing ourselves, plus cost of hardware, license etc.

Now considering dumping the office win2003 servers completely and moving them over, as they are starting to show their age.

No longer a user of CRM, but why not get a couple of trials going? Play them off against each other.

Here's another with a 30 day trial.
salesforce.com/uk/crm/sales-force-automation

May mean some duplication, but as long as you can get some data through it with a couple of power users, you should have a good idea if it's for you.

Microsoft dropped a clanger this month. It rolled out a security patch which inadvertently blocked users from visiting Google

It was a genuine mistake (queue conspiracy theory) and MS sent an update a couple of days later to fix the issue.
Microsoft Security Patch Marked Google.com As Malware

Bet Bing traffic has never looked so good

Ok so Llyods announced today that they are claiming back

This is half the problem, we got some good exposure from local rags, picture of shaking hands with Mayors, Air Ambulance crew that sort of stuff, maybe this translated into a couple of links back to the site? But other than that, it's incredibly hard to monitor any results.

How many people reading about us in the paper then decided to go online and list their business on our directory? I'm guessing very few. Ok we could have the "where did you hear about us" page, but you only have that persons attention for such a short space of time, I'd sooner spend it on an upsell

We had similar issues with Radio advertising and Branded Taxi campaigns, it's trying to monitor offline exposure and gauge the effectiveness. Something like a flyers easier because you can send to a specific link and then track any traffic, but PR wise, I now just look at online releases.

We know they will get picked up by google news (however briefly) and normally generate a few links on different PR sites.

The one I want to try this year is a survey, but that's another story

Personally, I'd start afresh with a new quote, and treat it as a new job. If he's still happy, then no worries and you've got the T&C's stuff captured if the same happens again.

If he's not happy, then sounds like he's not really a client you will miss

Interesting insight into the world of web designers though, you'd normally assume a client wants their site as a fast as possible, not stalling for 12 months!

Google used to use it a base for its own directory, so it was really important to get on there. But that was a long time ago and its importance has diminished over the years.

If you can get in, go for it its free. If you don't here anything 6 months later, don't worry about it and move on.