Like any advertising or marketing campaign, its success and failure may not rest on the quality of SEO work done, but on the standard of a site and the services offered. A talented search expert can optimise any site to a certain extent; but a high search engine ranking is going to be of little or no help if you have an equally lofty bounce rate.

It's a co-operative process. In order to gain the very best results, an SEO expert has to be able to exchange ideas freely with a site owner, whether they're part of the same company or providing an outsourced service. As with any team you also need to work to your strengths, but you're still only as good as your weakest link. If one part of a site is failing, be it design, content, architecture or even the SEO itself, then the rest may be rendered redundant regardless of your comparative strengths.

SEO isn't simply a crutch to help an ailing site. The core purpose is simply to drive traffic to a site through improved search engine rankings, that's the fundamental underlying purpose of it. Once those visitors have arrived at a site, the responsibility shifts. The question is though, is that shirking accountability or being a conscientious professional?

At the outset of any SEO project you need to be sure of the website's credentials. Some are just simply impossible to promote without a significant overhaul. As the expert you need to act like a business loan assessor. Whilst you'd like as much custom as you can get, some companies just don't have the business model to provide satisfactory reassurances that they can repay you. In an SEO context this means that you can take the work, but be prepared for the recriminations if and when it eventually fails.

Too often people become blinded by hits. Unless you have a system that monetises a site for every click it receives, the lone visitor is effectively just an empty statistic. To really get the benefit of each person that visits your site you need a call to action, a hook that will make them want to explore your site further and end up using your services. If that isn't there, then no matter how much traffic you drive in, it could be doomed to failure.

SEO professionals have a responsibility to be honest from the outset. If a website is a train wreck from the beginning, time and money would be better spent elsewhere rather than on search engine marketing. That might be an uncomfortable answer for some, but ultimately it's a poor reflection on you if a site under your jurisdiction collapses.

Too often bad websites find a way around the increasingly complex algorithms and end up top of the search engine heap. Developments like Google Caffeine could soon put an end to this but the notion that just being top can be the pathway to untold riches needs to be quashed. The quality of a site's content is the greatest measure of its success; endless clicks and a 99 per cent bounce rate make for interesting graphs but achieve little else.

The SEO expert is no soothsayer; they can't foresee the future and they certainly can't provide the cure for a mortally wounded website. However, they do know how to get a website ranking on search engines. In collaboration with designers, webmasters and site owners there's no reason to doubt that any project can't be a success. But it is that collaborative element that is so important.

Throwing good money after bad will be of no benefit to anybody. If a website genuinely lacks the quality to succeed, more often than not it won't; a little constructive criticism may be far more beneficial to all concerned than implementing a comprehensive SEO infrastructure to a doomed site.