There Are No Tricks to SEO

SEO IS NOT TRICKY OR MYSTERIOUS

All of the folks involved with a website should be informed about and have a strategy in mind when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) This makes great sense because proper SEO techniques will help your site appear at the top of the search engine results page. There are many strategies that a person concerned with SEO should utilize, and most of them can be found under the webmaster tools produced by Google and Bing. Additionally, you can find some cool tools to use from ScreamingFrog and SEO Mofo SERP Optimizer.

While all of these legitimate sources provide great information and using them will most likely improve your position on the search engine results pages (SERP) not a single one of them help you with the most important component of your SEO strategy. The answer to what is the best SEO strategy is straightforward yet so frequently overlooked and in some cases dismissed. Employing this strategy is never penalized and always encouraged. It is not easy to follow and requires work, but nothing of value ever comes easy.

WHAT IS THE BEST SEO STRATEGY?

High-quality content is the only sure way to improve, maintain or establish your SERP position. While there are plenty of "agencies" or "freelancers", I call them spammers, that will flood your inbox with claims of an ability to "get your site listed on the first page of Google" or "convert your visitors to sales", etc... the claims are virtually impossible if your site does not contain high-quality content. Using these spammers will most likely result in your site being penalized and possibly removed from the index of the search engine.

WHAT IS QUALITY CONTENT?

This is a funny question, and to most, the answer might be obvious, but quality content is content that contains the words or answers the questions asked by those searching the internet. You need to understand why people would want to visit your site and then develop the content that answers the question: "Why should I visit your website?"

Each and every page single should focus on one topic (keyword). Do not clutter your website with unnecessary pages but you should feel encouraged to develop as many pages as necessary to answer all of the reasons why someone would or should visit your website.

Quality Content is Attractive to Your Target Audience

Put yourself in the place of your target visitor and structure the content of your page to match up with the information being searched for by your target. Develop an overall persona that defines your best customers.

An Example Persona: men and women, aged 30 - 40 years, unemployed, and looking for work.

Appeal To or Answer The Questions Being Asked By Your Customer Persona

After you have set/defined your customers, produce content that answers what is being searched for, and that is appealing to your developed persona. You may even want to hire someone to help you generate content that is appropriate for your site. If you choose to hire a content writer, save yourself the headache and hire someone that is familiar with and void of cultural differences with your customer persona. I cannot tell you how many times a difference in cultural understanding, not a language issue, has been the culprit of unusable content. So, if your company is targeting an American readership/audience, you should hire an American to write your content.

WHAT ABOUT ALL OF THE OTHER SEO ARTICLES AND EXPERT OPINIONS ON SEO?

They are all contributions to the body of knowledge surrounding SEO, and the best ones include something about the content. This could be a simple statement such as: develop authoritative content or something slightly more sophisticated and include terms such as canonicalization, backlinks, microdata, etc... and without a doubt, these are strategies that will assist your quest for SEO. But, worry first about producing quality content and once you have amassed 51 individual pages of quality content implementing the other strategies will be somewhat easy.

If you need assistance or would like to discuss this further, please contact me or comment to this post and I will do my best to answer you in an extremely reasonable time frame.

KEYWORD RESEARCH

The number of visitors to your website will be directly related to whether your posts appear to answer questions asked in a search engine's search bar or how well your posts seem to align with the number of people surfing the world wide web.

One way to address those two concepts is to engage in Keyword Research. Keyword research simply means discovering the terms that people search for and incorporating those exact terms into your site content. 

Here is a short course from LinkedIn on Keyword Research.

View the keyword universe from SEO: Keyword Strategy by Matt Bailey

Adobe CC Not Recognizing Exchange

Why is this an issue?

I have been a subscriber to Adobe CC since it became an option just a couple months ago and before that, I was a subscriber to Adobe CS 6 and have had all the previous versions from CS4 up installed on my Mac.  I never doubted my decision on any level when I purchased a subscription; I felt my choice was strongly supported by Adobe when they announced a full commitment on CC (creative cloud) and no more revisions on the CS product. However, occasionally the installations of applications, plug-ins, etc... has been a bit troublesome.

Today, I was so excited to find a plug-in, CSS3Ps, that proclaimed to turn the webpage mock-up that I just designed in Photoshop CC into very easy and ready to use CSS code. Of course, this ability is included in the latest version of Photoshop CC, but for some reason, the CSS code that was promised by the free CSS3Ps plug-in available on Adobe Exchange looked more appealing. 

So, I downloaded the CSS3Ps.zpx file and thought within just a few minutes I would be ready for action...

Photoshop and Dreamweaver are Not Communicating With Exchange!

Yes, when I tried to open up Adobe Exchange within Photoshop CC or Dreamweaver CC, I was getting error messages that read Adobe Exchange was not being found by Creative Cloud. I thought I noticed this issue a month ago or so, but I chalked it up to the plug-in being incompatible with my current version. Today, I found out that somewhere my Adobe files had been corrupted.

I read many forums and blogs on how to solve these issues, including deleting files from the  /Library/Application Support/Adobe directory, using the usual Adobe Uninstaller Programs, to remove all the leftover files that Adobe seems to leave behind.

After using all of the solutions above, I was stumped a once more trying to find the link from which I could easily download the Creative Cloud Installer. Of course, it is about 4 rows down on the webpage, and I kept missing it. Once I downloaded the installation process, which for some reason took over 1 hour, I encountered the error: "Adobe Creative Cloud Installer Fails to Initialize."

If You Have an ADOBE CC Issue Do Not Use Any of The Typical Methods of Removing an App on the MAC.

I believe the fact that I started my 15 hours (still not done) Adobe adventure with trying traditional methods to uninstall the programs just made matters worse. My recommendation is that you use ADOBE CLEANER. This program gives you the option to try the uninstall method once more, or you can just remove the Adobe version that you select. It works on the ancient versions too, so do not worry about being to old school for this utility. Benefit from my troubles, and the time it took for me to finally stumble upon the proper forum with the appropriate question to become aware of it.

I Still Believe You Can't Find A Better Set of Programs For The Money.

With the current cloud subscriptions topping out at just under $50/ month, and access to all of the Adobe favorites and even more,  I do not think you can go wrong with a subscription. The installation/program issues have been few and far between, although I have noticed them. I would estimate about 10 total issues, including program crashes, etc... since January 2013. So, I encourage you to not be discouraged by my post but to be encouraged by the availability of Adobe Cleaner!!!

Enjoy yourself, and be creative!