When it comes to SEO, I don’t just advise with platitudes. I get the work done, from soup to nuts. When I talk SEO, I mean organic search engine optimization, not including black hat link building or buying ads. I work hard on making your site faster, better, more complete, and I make sure all your images have ALT tags, all your copy has keywords, all your CSS and JS are optimized and cached, and I will make sure you’re wired to Google Analytics, Google Webmasters, Bing Webmaster Tools and even Yandex. I’ll implement Yoast SEO, if you’re on Drupal or WordPress, and I’ll even get you onto the Cloudflare CDN for free to help speed things up.
One of my recent clients fired Neil Patel because of my mad skills and efficacy! Serious. I couldn’t believe it either.
I really love helping anyone and everyone to become as successful as possible when it comes to their findability on Google, Bing, and all the others. No matter how much people talk about wanting to be optimized for Google search by optimizing the content and quality and speed of their site, very few people actually do it. Everyone seems to think that all they need to do is buy links instead of making a better site filled with better content, better accessibility, using faster code and better servers and even more optimized, mobile native and AMP-enabled templates.
I can help you from soup to nuts. I can fix your CMS sites and have years of experience with Squarespace and a decade of experience with Drupal, WordPress, Movable Type, and Plone. I have been developing websites from soup to nuts since 1994 and programming open source content management systems since 1999, from the birth of the Blogger blog (called Pyra).
I have been developing websites for clients since 1994 and have been promoting them online since then. Then, before Google, it was mostly directories instead of indexed and spidered search engines. Then Google launched in September of 1998, and I have been chasing Google’s algorithms ever since. And the more Google changes, the more they stay the same. Google cares about literal phrases, it cares about user experience, it cares about relevant links and mobile accessibility. It cares about domain authority and age. It cares about the company each page each website keeps. Google is quick to trust but also so quick to penalize. I consider myself a search engine whisperer, especially when it comes to Google search.
As part of my SEO practice, I also do personal and corporate online reputation management (ORM) which is defensive SEO. Back in 2003, my team and I developed a process by which we could counter-message negative search results and then push them down by flooding Google’s and Bing’s search index with both creating new positive and neutral content as well as reactivating older and archival positive and neutral content, which bubbles up positive and neutral search results and, over time, pushes down negative and unwanted Google and Bing search results down past the first, second, and oftentimes past the third page of Google. This often works with Google and Bing images and predictive search as well. We, and I, have done this for high personal wealth individuals as well as for women who were at the mercy of revenge porn as well as local lawyers, doctors, dentists, and business wieners who need to recover from negative search results as well as personal online attacks. It takes a lot of work.
SEO Automation – most modern content management (CMS) sites support plugins and modules. There are a variety of 3rd party modules that can automatically optimize site content and site images in the background after setting up these plug-ins and integrating them into Google and Bing Webmaster tools, etc.
Writing for SEO – most traditional copywriters are appalled by how they’re taught to write for search. Luckily, Google’s recently become more interested in user experience and readability; however, Google still only returns pages that literally have the searched-for words on them. So, writing for SEO is a balance between readability and user experience and having all the words and phrases your site needs to have to show up on search literally on the pages of your site. This also includes linking, keywords, etc.
Writing Copy for Search – Also, writing content for search. Since Google Search is extremely literal, it’s important that whatever search terms that you want your site to show up for, you need to have both the literal phrase in there and also a cornucopia of similar content. In search, SEO experts spend a lot of time doing keyword research, trying to find the least competitive search terms that would result in their site being found and then write to that; also, people oftentimes will write content based on Google Trends, trying to surf the most currently-successful content to drive traffic to their sites. Writing copy for search is all about creating content that is the most compelling to Google and Bing search so that their sites show up organically on Google under these terms.
Optimizing Drupal for Search – white database-backed CMS and blog platforms can be like catnip to Google Search based on its architecture and how professional Drupal sites tend to be, Drupal can also be a pig hog of a resource-intensive site. There are so many useful plugins and off-site 3rd party services available, each of which can slow Drupal down. Additionally, server speed, caching, image optimization, and database optimization and responsiveness, can bog down a site to where Google won’t be willing to pass visitors off to it. This can really kill search results even if the site is content-optimized for search. In the new search, all parts contribute to where your site shows up organically on search.
Optimizing WordPress for Search – WordPress is one the easiest database-backed platforms online. Unfortunately, the success of the site directly affects its performance. While you can install WordPress sites on a $3.95/month web host, it’s not recommended. As a database-backed site, each additional plugin and 3rd party script can slow down a WordPress site to where Google might be unwilling to rely on it and will lower its placement in the Google rankings. So, even if the copy is on point and the site is architecturally and keyword-optimized with content that passes Google’s muster of readability while still covering all preferred keywords and phrases, you still need choose the right hosting company, have a server with enough RAM, a fast enough drive (or a quick enough virtual server), close enough to the Internet backbone (tier 1 service), image optimization, adequate caching, and possible integration with a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
Content Delivery Network (CDN) – A content delivery network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to distribute service spatially relative to end-users to provide high availability and high performance. In addition to investing in better servers, better hosting, better caching, database optimization, image optimization, adding a CDN to the mix can make your site show up everywhere around the world without any undue delay. It can be a very effective service, especially for new and ecommerce sites.
Site Speed Optimization – So many companies are willing to pay thousands of dollars on SEO consultants and site developers but are unwilling to spend enough money on making sure their sites are being hosting on a powerful and responsive enough hardware, virtual, or cloud server solution to support not just the site being fast enough for your visitors, readers, or customers, but quick and responsive enough to pass Google’s PageSpeed Insights site speed test. It’s not only the allocated RAM memory or the speed of the hard drive, it’s also the responsiveness of the database, the site caching, the optimization and minification of images, CSS, HTML, and even JavaScript. There are so many advantages to 2018 Google Search; however, one of them that can be frustrating is that if your site isn’t as responsive as Google Search itself, Google might de-prioritize your listing based solely on that fact and not whether your site offers the best content. Even if your site is perfectly optimized for keywords and architecture and your link strategy is on point, if your site is perceived as too slow or not quick enough, Google will ignore it. I will be so bold as to add mobile and accelerated mobile page (AMP) to optimization via site speed.