Free SEO Advice

I offer search engine optimization advice to all of my clients, as much as they’d like me to impart upon them. Now, I’ve decided to just offer it up to anyone who’d like to listen. Firstly, and this may come as a surprise to anyone who’s been researching SEO firms to hear me say this, but I don’t consider myself an SEO expert. I say that because really no one is an expert, outside of the people specifically working on the algorithm that Google uses to calculate who ranks where. To be an expert, you have to know pretty much everything there is to know on a subject, in my opinion, and since that information is not readily made public, well, you get the drift.

But there are some things we do know.

  • The best SEO you can ever do or have done to your site is to create great content. Write highly informative articles or shorter, more poignant articles often. Create engaging videos or post up fun and interesting photographs. The better your content, the more humans will want to visit it, and in turn link to it. This is all you really should ever need to do to get to the top of just about any search engine result.
  • Focus on a geographic location, such as Pittsburgh. Say you sell socks, and you want to do it online. You’ll have a helluva time competing against every other sock company out there to show up at #1 when someone searches for socks, but you just might have a real, decent chance at showing up for pittsburgh socks. Focus your business, get better results.
  • Don’t pay anyone to get your backlinks. That company you’re paying, they want your $250. They’re going to submit your website to anyone that’ll let them put up a link, and a lot of those sites are going to throw up a red flag to Google: hey, this person is cheating, why don’t you punish them by knocking them a few hundred pages south of the #1 position.
  • Title tags and Meta Description tags matter, meta keyword tags don’t. Please don’t waist your time adding them to your site, they’re digital clutter and if anything, can adversely affect your site’s rankings.
  • Make certain your site is built with web standards compliant, valid HTML, and that you follow typical outline rules when creating page content (ie, Heading 3 goes under Heading 2 goes under Heading 1, etc.). Limit http requests. Use image sprites. Need help with those last bits? That’s what I’m here for.