For those of us who practice the art of creating and maintaining good sites, we had nothing to worry about.  Google has made some great changes to reward good content and web development.  I have always preached that developing appropriate content is the way to a “natural reward”.  If the content is good and provides a service or information for your visitors, you are contributing to the “greater good” of the web and Google will reward you for this. So the first “do” on the list is to CREATE GOOD CONTENT.

The 2nd “do” involves web structure.  As a web developer and programmer, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of smart web design and development.  My motto is, “You gotta keep them separated!”  What I mean by this is you must use CSS to house your design elements and use HTML for site structure and content.  If you keep the design elements out of the page, the bots that scan your pages will see what your visitors see and be able to get to the heart of the content.  Also, I think you should include appropriate meta tags in your header.  Some experts say you don’t need title and keyword meta tags anymore, but I disagree.  They may not help your rankings on Google but they do help categorize your content and some search engines still use the information.  It’s a nice touch to a site and shows that you thought about what the page’s purpose is and what is about. So “do” number two is GOOD WEB DESIGN!

The 3rd thing that will help your Google rank is FRESH CONTENT.  I think this is the hardest thing for most people to do because it takes the most time and energy.  Fresh content usually means blogging which means RSS feeds (or some other feed) which means social media and bookmarking sites will pick up your content and your link building will gain momentum.  Most people trying to get to the top of Google know that lots of links to their site usually means lots of love.  But it’s not just the number of links to your site that’s important, it’s type of link.  You want good quality links from sites that host similar content as you do.  Quality content and blog material will help you get to this point.

Regardless of what Google does with its algorithm, you will always make progress and work your way to the top if you implement these three simple but effective strategies:

1) Good and appropriate content

2) Good web design

3) Fresh content

About four years ago I launched my site after spending about 30 minutes on design and content.  I wanted to launch something quickly, but knew I would go back and fix it up shortly.

So here I am, four years later, fixing her up!

I decided to use a pre-made WordPress template since I am busy with other projects.  I’m sure I could have designed and created at least a dozen templates with the time it took me to decide on one.  I looked at over a 1000 templates.  Yes, that’s correct, there are three zeros there – that’s not a typo.  Anyway, I’m not sure how my path led me to N.design studios, but I finally found my template!  This template is simple, soothing to look at and list-like, plus it’s based on the Notes App!  (I’m a big list maker so this really fit with my personality). It was easy for me to add my twitter feed and set it up the way I wanted.  So far, I really like this design and am so happy for wonderfully talented people who share their skills with the rest of us.

I hope to post some useful information in the days, weeks, months and years to come.  I had a New Year’s Resolution to share some of my knowledge and use this site more fully.  I love to share my knowledge (it’s the teacher in me) and hopefully I can offer some SEO tips and tricks, web design and development opinions and talk about appropriate e-learning practices.  I have a lot of opinions too, so I’m sure if you keep up you’ll get a myriad of information.

If you haven’t already, follow me on Twitter – if you are a person or viable business I’ll follow you back.  If you are trying to sell skin, I’m not interested!

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…