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SEO & Marketing

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Skills and Services

  • SEO writing and editing.
  • Best-practice strategies like sitemaps and meta information.
  • Social media content development and marketing.
  • E-mail marketing and contact management.
  • Management of AdSense, AdWords and other contextual advertising solutions.

Background

Many claim to know magic tricks to search engine rankings. Some, in fact, do. But such knowledge rarely lasts. Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing work on sophisticated algorithms designed specifically not to be tricked. If someone finds a back door, it won't be long before it's sealed.

The best way to manage SEO is to say exactly what your website is in clear, strong, SEO-friendly language and adhere to a set of common best practices such using a well-organized site map, a small selection of relevant keywords and defining clear URLs for your pages. There is no real registration process for your website, although some will try to sell you such a service. There is no one to call and dictate what you want to say and where you want your site to be placed as you would with a Yellow Pages ad.

One of my last projects with the Rocky Mountain News was to improve our search engine rankings for the phrase "Denver Broncos" and other relevant terms. It was, perhaps, a bit of a vanity experiment on the part of the newspaper — we were already on the first page of Google. What that project, and many others like it, have taught me is that you can load up your site with all the keywords you want, but in the end two things matter above all others. Say clearly what your are with the name, meta information and content for your site — for instance, a site dedicated to news about the Denver Broncos. Search engines will take that into account, but only to a degree. Just as important, perhaps more so, is what people using the internet — for instance, those who regularly visit other sites dedicated to news about the Denver Broncos — have to say about your site with their actions. What do they click, how long do they stay and how often do they come back?

True Search Engine Optimization has considerably less to do with magic tricks like loading your website with keywords than it does making your site useful to your target audience.