After a few years of frustration over the path that SEO has taken and my unwillingness to play games I decided to move back into the SEO space after all. Let me point out that black-hat SEO (trying to trick search engines into ranking your site better than it should) has mostly dissipated due to the vigilant efforts by google et al to prevent exactly such measures. I remember when a friend bought 1000 domains, literally, only to create thousands of backlinks to his main website. Those backlinks were – and to a certain degree still are – one of the most important qualification for good ranking in search engines. After all, google started to revolutionize the search engine market by weighing the popularity of a website by way of the number of backlinks.
But the quality of those sites that link back is most important. And my friend didn’t have the actual bandwidth to create 1000 great websites… he just had some dummy content and in the end, partly due to artificial intelligence – which “reads” entire websites – those dummy sites actually HURT my friend’s effort. In fact, most of us can tell now if a website’s content is purely written for SEO purposes or is actually authoritative. There may be a fine line, and you’ll certainly find a good number of keywords throughout our website here, but that’s on purpose.
As of June 5, 2019, we rank above #50 in google for a search for “Web design Los Angeles” which is one of the key phrases we are now optimizing this website for. Yea. I’ll be quite open about this process because, ultimately, my goal is to sell this service to my clients and the best proof of our capabilities will be, of course, our own ranking.
I like to tell the story of one of the websites we built for the Department of Tsunami Research at the University of Southern California. My friend, Costas Synolakis, certainly is an authority on the topic and his website ranked #1 for many years. But he has since pretty much given up on effort and after about 8 years of negligence, google finally dropped his website below #10. It was pretty impressive, though, to see him rank in the top without any so-called optimizations. Of course, we properly code our websites and adhere to best standards but the key to good rankings is always good content. Authoritative content.
And we certainly are an authority when it comes to Web design in Los Angeles 🙂
