At Promotions 101 my goal is to teach the average person how to better use SEO practices to help their website rank better in Google search results, attract more subscribers, and have an easy to navigate and well structured website. Our target audience is the small business owner, the hobbyist, the people who run clubs or non-profits in their spare time, people who don’t have hours and hours to spend writing copy and setting up thousands of back links. Specifically we want to talk about how you can achieve this by using the open source content management system WordPress. Not only is it one of the most versatile and user-friendly content management systems out there, it’s also excellent for SEO.
I started building my own websites in 1997 when I was 15 years old, back before SEO or even Google really existed. I had signed up for a free website through Angelfire (remember them?!) and started teaching myself HTML so that I could better set up my amazing website for a text based game centered around horse breeding, showing, and racing. I guess my hard work paid off, as we grew to have over 100 users. It doesn’t sound like a lot by todays standards, but that was pretty big for a text-based game being run by a kid back then! I was given the opportunity to attend a specialized high school where I would take university level courses in web development while finishing my high school diploma, there I was introduced to CSS and some basic programming. I continued my studies in programming and web development after graduating, and eventually got a job working for a large ecommerce company. There I was introduced to the concept of Search Engine Optimization.
I departed the ecommerce company after 2 years, spent another 2 years freelancing for small businesses, and then worked at a web design and development firm for publicly traded companies for 3 years after that. One thing remained constant throughout all of these jobs: people wanted to know how to get their website to rank higher in Google. It does take some work, and unfortunately SEO best practices are always evolving to keep up with Google’s algorithm changes, but there are some core concepts that have not changed over the years. I would like to introduce you to them through this website.