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EP18: SEO for Developers & Expert Advice from Carrie Dils

October 3, 2017

In this week’s podcast episode. Rebecca is joined by her good friend Carrie Dils.

Carrie Dils Headshot

The two spend the session chatting about the importance of freelancers understanding the nuances of SEO for developers.

Carrie and Rebecca have co-hosted two SEO Bootcamp workshops and Carrie also wrote four-part blog post series called 30 Days to Better SEO. Carrie utilizes her SEO knowledge and breaks it down into bite-size pieces for developers.

Highlights from Carrie and Rebecca’s Chat

  • SEO is about content, but SEO is also about code.
  • What developers don’t know about SEO can and will hurt their web development clients.
  • Everything that is good for accessibility is also good for SEO.
  • Developers need to understand SEO to better market themselves and to help their protect their clients.
  • It’s important to think like a search engine when writing code and creating websites.

Carrie’s List of SEO Topics Developers Need to Know

  • Schema and structured data
  • Creating a clean code base
  • Link structure and content silos
  • Consistent permalink structures
  • 301 redirects
  • Mobile responsive design and coding
  • Performance and speed optimization
  • Tabbed content and how it can hamper SEO efforts

Carrie’s Advice for End Users Looking for an SEO Friendly Developer

  • Ask potential developers about their approach to SEO
  • Ask developers how they would weave SEO best practices into their development process
  • Google the developers business name or personal name to see if they appear at the top of Google search
  • Ask for references and review them thoroughly
  • Review Github to see if code base is organized or a hot mess of babble

SEO Resources for Developers

  • Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet from Moz
  • SEO Checklist for Website Redesigns
  • 301 Redirects
  • Content Silos
  • Tabbed SEO Content
  • Google’s Mobile First Indexing
  • Technical SEO
  • To the Top SEO Course

Where You Can Find Carrie

  • Website
  • OfficeHours.fm podcast
  • Twitter
  • Lynda.com Courses

If you enjoyed this podcast episode, please consider sharing it on social media or leaving us a review on iTunes.

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About Rebecca Gill

Rebecca is the Founder of Web Savvy Marketing and produces a series of online SEO courses. She has over 15 years of real-world experience in search engine optimization with 20 years of experience in sales and marketing.

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to SEObits! The podcast that helps smart business owners jumpstart their SEO strategy.  Tune in each week for fresh SEO insights and actionable tips that will helps you improve your site’s SEO, one bit at a time.

Now here is your host, SEO trainer and consultant, Rebecca Gill.

Hello my friends and welcome back to another episode of SEObits. Today, I have the privilege of having my very good friend Carrie Dils join me, so we can talk about the development side of SEO. Carrie is well known in the WordPress space for her efforts in educating and coaching freelancers. She hosts a very popular podcast for freelancers called OfficeHours.fm. She teaches WordPress and front end development courses for Lynda.com and she is also in the process of writing a book that is specifically for freelancers and developers.

If you’ve not noticed, she works a lot with freelancers and developers which is exactly why I wanted her on the show today. So Carrie and I.. I did some digging and I realized that it had been almost four years since we met back at WordCamp Las Vegas and I did a blog post after the conference -and that’s how I  knew this. And here’s what I’ve said about you.. “Because Carrie is a fellow Genesis developer I knew of her well before working in Las Vegas. I knew of her coding skills and her over all reputation within the Genesis community. But Carrie is so much more than a coder. She’s sweet and funny and can sing a mean blues tune when the situation presents itself. I truly hoped this weekend was only the beginning of a very close relationship with Carrie because I would really like to learn more about her and her super powers of awesomeness.” Which I was totally right! This girl has it going on. I’m so happy that that was just the first of many adventures that we’ve had at conferences together.  You know, since then I’ve spend time at her house, I’ve met her husband, I’ve met her dogs. I know lots about her. But I know some of you on today’s podcast do not. So I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome Carrie, and then give her a little bit of time to talk a little bit about herself and her past life. So Carrie, welcome I’m so happy that you’re here.

Hey Rebecca! Thanks for having me and yah, you have plenty of black mail material on me at this point.

I will keep it secret for always, unless you get rich and then, I hold no promises.

You actually summed it up really, really nicely. My background is in front end web development, and sort of full service web development for small businesses and been doing that since late 90’s. And more recently I moved in to trying to help other developers level up their skill set as well as freelancers, helping freelancers just learn to do the basic of running a successful business.

I love that you focus on education because obviously it’s been my passion this last year and a half with SEO. It’s one thing to help people, but it’s another thing to educate them and know that you’re giving them long lasting super powers. I love it, absolutely love it.

So when we met four years ago, we didn’t talk about SEO, back then. We didn’t really get into that kind of topic until SEO Bootcamps and you took my SEO course.  And since then, I think I have immersed you with as much SEO knowledge that I can shove at  you and I have probably bored you to death at times. But that’s ok. What was your impression of search engine optimization before you had me spewing at you nonstop?

Well first of all, it’s not boring. It’s actually quite fascinating to understand that there’s sort of a method behind the madness. I think a lot of what I thought about SEO, even though I knew you and respected your reputation, I have just heard a lot of negative things about people who do SEO marketing.  The whole buying ads..I guess not a…again, you were the one that sort of made me think twice about this as being something that’s not smarmy, but a legitimate…something that you can do to help put your best foot forward with search engines.

SEO is legit - if you find the right person. And you have the right education, you know you work on it yourself.

So after SEO Bootcamp..we did two SEO Bootcamps together and for those of you that are not familiar with it..it’s an on-sight workshop that we co-host.  We’ve had Cory Miller with us and it’s three to four days of eight hours, each day nonstop SEO education. Then working on things associated for the students actual websites or blogs.  Carrie sat through them – and has been my side kick. After you went through that and you’ve been immersed in it. How did your view of SEO change?

Oh my gosh! There’s so much to it. It’s not just about a keyword or a meta description and it’s not just set it forget it.  There are so many components to it. Frankly, it feels little overwhelming to learn.  But as a developer I have kind of learned and maybe we talk about this later, but what some of those kind of key elements are for me to focus in on. But overall, it’s SEO is a mental framework, right? So just like web accessibility, when I approach a website project, I’ve got accessibility in my mind, now I’ve got SEO in my mind.

That is awesome!  That just makes me happy because that’s what I want all of the developers to do. I really do.

So, if you were you were talking to a developer and not about what they’re doing for their clients, but those freelancers that you help coach and mentor and educate, those developers. How would you talk to them about SEO’s role in their business? Well number one, they can use SEO for their own site to help get ranked and noticed on search engines by potential customers. Secondly, when it comes to their clients, even if they’re not actively…even if the client hasn’t hired them to work on SEO, there’s still certain things they need to understand, so that their not accidentally doing something that could have a negative impact on their clients website.

That is what I see all the time because I’ll have coaching calls on clarity or someone will do inquiry or find me a conference and they have this huge tale of woe that happened after they did a re-launch of their site.  It’s just because the developer didn’t know what they didn’t know and it caused a cascading effect  of downward ranking and lost traffic and lost conversion and lost revenue.  And people don’t mean to do it, it’s just they don’t know.

So that’s what leads me to my next question. What are some of the areas that developers need to know about SEO? I know the one in my head, but I’m interested to see or hear what you think because you actually do coding, unlike me that just looks at it from afar.

So I’m not telling you anything that you don’t know but, there’s more than one person who is responsible for good SEO on a website. So ultimately whoever is writing the content, they’re going to be “SEO-ing” up their content.  As a developer that’s not what I am thinking of. I’m thinking of the overall code structure.  Is it clean? Am I using…I work a lot with WordPress? And as you mentioned, the Genesis framework which has really clean semantically written code. If you want to get really nerdy and granular about it.  It’s the things like a button. It should actually be the html element of a button, not a link that is styled to look like a button. Little things like that, that this is also going to sound weird, everything that’s good for web accessibility is also fantastic for SEO.  Because what you are doing is serving it to search to engines on a silver platter, exactly what the content of your site is.  As well as, what kind of content it is.  So you know that’s you get into schema.  Are we talking about a person, or article, an educational resource?.. You can pull me back in because I’m kind of rambling at this point.  I think the biggest things to be aware of are working, if your going to work with the theme frame, framework, or a CMS like WordPress.  Look at the code base. It matters.  And then any custom code that you’re adding on top of that, you want to make sure that you are following those best practices.  And again, best practices equals accessibility equals SEO.

Yes, best practices for accessibility definitely, you know, ties into SEO because when you break SEO down - the search engines, they want to create a positive user experience. And they don’t just want to do it for the segment of the world that doesn’t have accessibility issues. They want for everybody and you have to look at accessibility and how you are doing things, if you really want to appeal to the search engines and search and bring in that traffic.

So you mention schema, you mentioned a good clean code base. So break down that good clean code base. Right? Or some of the areas where themes can go wrong and can have a detriment to SEO. One of my big ones is when people code in html5, they throw 20 H1 headers on the page because they say that you can. Which is true, you can and your not going to be penalized for having it.  However, you are not helping the search engines understand the architecture and the structure of the page which 1 H1, some H2s, some H3s, help the search engine see that outline and understand, you know, the content better. And I know from people online, they say that helps with accessibility too. So that’s one of my pet peeves.  You know, what of the some other areas you could suggest for developers to, you know, do a double check for themselves or for end-users to make sure that their new developer or their new theme would adhere to this.

So for brand new sites, and even for existing sites, but the URL matters, right? The link structure that you set up matters, and for new content silos, nesting related content and so forth.  But in my early days of working with WordPress, I knew nothing about permalinks, or really understood their importance and probably, I don’t know, three or four times, within the first year of my website I changed permalinks structure. Just experimenting and trying different things out. Now I know that in addition, to screwing up the link references and creating broken links on my site, that I was a hot mess in how I presented my content to Google. So I think from the very beginning, just being aware of the fact that link structure  does matter and think about that as you set up link structure and what that is going to look like. And as you coach your client, on adding future content, I get verklempt when I talk about SEO. But helping your clients understand the importance of URL’s. So sample - yoururl.com/samplepage2 is a terrible URL and it doesn’t really tell Google anything.

Before getting on with you, on was on a call with a prospect, you know, he’s coming to us to tweak his design, tweak the code and I’m looking at it and I’m like.. we really need to tweak your URL structure too. He said, “Why?” I said because your entire website is flat. You’ve got hierarchies that should exist, with your content and I can see it in your navigation, but the developer didn’t create any of it and it is completely flat. He did not understand content silos, so I had to explain that concept to him. You know and why they do matter in SEO - but the developer, didn’t mean to do it, they just know any better. Yes, so content silos…

So funny thing that you said..while good accessibility means good SEO, big fat hot mess does not equal good SEO. So those are your two take aways for today.

What are other things should people be aware of? Obviously, the accessibility things with ALT text and things like that. You want your code base to have strong performance in speed because that definitely matters to the search engines.  And it is going to matter even more as they move towards that mobile first indexing, which is supposed to be coming in early 2018. Other areas that people should be aware of?

I’m really glad you mention the mobile thing because - it’s 2017 for crying out loud - you should have a mobile website, but certainly because Google is… I mean you should have it because it’s a good experience for your users. I’m actually glad that Google is moving towards, maybe I’m saying this wrong, but preferred or preferential, assuming you have two websites and all things were equal - the one that is mobile responsive would rank higher than the one that was not.

Yes, in fact, they have come out to say that having two websites… if you have a mobile version of your website and you have a desktop version OR you could have a mobile responsive version which is both. They prefer the mobile responsive version because it is only one set of URLs that they have to worry about. It’s much easier for them to digest your content and position it in that mobile first index.  That was just something that I heard them say within the last 45 days. I think about these large brands that have these completely separate websites and totally different structures.  And nothing ticks me off more than when I am at Lowe’s or Home Depot and I’m trying to look something up on their website because I can’t find it in the store…and I get the mobile version of it and it doesn’t have any information on it. It’s like…just get me more information but, I digress.

Yeah seriously, it makes me want to stab myself in the eye. And restaurant websites too, that have a pdf for their menu..I am UGH!!  You can’t read it on a mobile device.  The interesting thing is you said - for crying out loud it’s 2017, everybody mobile responsive website! But probably half the small businesses in the U.S don’t have websites still. That amazes me, totally amazes me.

That’s true. So in that case they have the advantage of starting fresh with a mobile site. The other thing for a developer to focus on it, especially if you’re coming in on a site that’s existing… You had mentioned this earlier, with developers accidentally making mistakes that cause rankings to fall etc. But for the developers listening to this and you are taking hold of an existing site and re-modeling it, so to speak, make sure that you take a before and after snapshot of every URL and map ever before to every after and if there is a change, create the right re-direct.

The 301 redirect. The tool I love for doing what you just mentioned is DynoMapper. So I pay for it and it does have a free scaled-down version, but you can use DynoMapper to crawl the entire website and get a full dump of all of your URLs. Then you can use it again to crawl the development website and again get a dump and then you can start comparing those together. That is what we use at WebSavvy, when we are doing either SEO or web design projects because it’s best way to make sure you get everything, since a lot of times, clients don’t know their URLs. They don’t know how much content they actually have and they miss a lot. I have had people say “I only have like 50 pages.” But no, you really have 500 URLs that we need to be concerned about and address.

That’s good one.  I am glad that you brought that up. Because the 301 redirects are your friends.

Can I throw one more in there? Yeah!

So a design trend for while and I’m going to kind of lump designers and developers here for a second. But a trend that I saw a lot was tabbed content.  So say on your home page you’ve got these five tabs and each tab has a little blurb about a service you provide. It’s not linking off anywhere to a more detailed page, like that’s just it. That’s really not great for SEO because your giving no specific focus to a page.  Instead of using tabs to display all that content, break those things out into their own individual pages and flesh out the content.  Or get your client to flesh out the content. So that Google has a page to focus on for whatever the topic is.

The other issue with the tabs is based on how they are coded, Google may not actually be able to read it all. And if they can’t read all the content they can’t rank you for it.

Ooh, that’s a good one!

I wrote a blog post on it 3 years ago and that was when Google really couldn’t read the content behind tabs.  Now they are better at it, but there is still certain types of code structures that they just can’t read. They just see the very first bit of information..enough, but none of the rest. That’s definitely challenging.

Okay, you also took my SEO course online.  I don’t remember if this was before or after bootcamps..I think it was before the first bootcamp. It was February 2016. You started a four  part blog series called 30 days to better SEO. Which I thought was really cool and you had some great feedbacks on it. As you went through the course, besides realizing that it could be  a complete rabbit hole that sucked up your entire day. Which I remember you talking about. What were some take ways or kind of epiphanies that you had through that process?

I think one of the big ones, and in retrospect it sounds so obvious, but it wasn’t obvious to me and that’s creating content that is central to a particular topic and going in depth on it. That doesn’t mean you can’t discus more than one thing in say, a blog post, but it help me think about it, maybe how a search engine would think about it. Somebody is doing search for Genesis tutorial about archive pages, then it should be really clear, if I write blog post about that - that that’s exactly what the blog post is about. And really it is just an issue of a few wording tweaks. But I was not doing that. The other thing is, I had…I knew about keywords, I guess just enough to be dangerous on focus keywords. I had old posts that I’d written, where I had tried to rank for keywords that had nothing to do with my business.

And that sounds stupid, but I did it. I wrote a post and it was about, you know different sorts of software that I use in my business.  I tried to rank on SaaS software reviews. If somebody landed on my site, I doubt I ranked for that. But say, somebody did land on that article from that search phrase. That would not at all be what they were expecting to find and what do I need with people that are looking for SaaS software. That is not what I do. I know it’s ridiculous. And now I’m saying it on air that I did it - Rebecca Gill.

Here’s the interesting part about that - so when, I write about SEO, I write about WordPress, I write about website design.  I always use the example, if I tried to start writing about “Viagra,” you know, and coaching people on the use of viagra, I’m not going to rank because it’s not who I am. The search engines know that’s not who I am. There are just going to ignore it. They also do that with links.  So if there are inbound links coming in to your site that have no relevance what so ever to you, for the most part they ignore them because they are not relevant.  They don’t take them into building up your credibility and your online persona because they just view it as an outliner and they just dismiss it.

It’s funny how when you start to get start SEO education that you look at the world differently and things become common sense that weren’t even on your radar before.

I just wanted to hit page one on Google, but apparently you actually want hit page one for a term that is relevant to what is you do and what you are selling your customers…who will convert visitors and actually bring in revenue or whatever else you are looking for.

Can I tell the listeners your keyword discovery from Google search council? Do you remember that? I do.  Go for it.

So, I’m working one day and all a sudden Carrie starts Skyping me messages, and she says “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, you are never going to believe what I’m ranking for?”

I’ve been doing SEO for 15 years, I have seen a lot of strange search terms. Well according to her Google search council people search for - “is it a sin to poop?” She was ranking really high on it. It’s all because she had said, in one of her blog posts, “Everybody poops,” like every makes mistakes. Well, because there’s a lack of data out there for that subject matter, because it’s weird, there wasn’t a lot of content to serve up. So Google decided that Carries blog was an awesome option for teaching people if it is ok or not ok to poop.

For the record, I am an avid proponent of pooping.

Anyways, I thought that was super funny and you never know what people are going to search for. You can look at the data.  You can look at statistics. But…humans are different beings, we are all unique, and we are goofy and we are funny in a good and a bad way. Every time I do  keyword research, I see the good and the bad of human nature and it always surprises me. If you want to see the same, dig into your Google search council and look at those search inquiries because you’ll be surprised the way people are getting to your site and what they are seeing. It’s just a world information. Her blog post of “is it a sin to poop,” proves that.

Ok, next question I have for you…You’ve been doing this for a long time. If you were to restart your freelance career and you could change things in regards to marketing and SEO, what would you change? Looking back at your old self and your newbie self, how would you council yourself to do things differently?

This is just related to SEO and definitely includes the marketing. It would just be to have some clarity around what services I was offering and who my target audience was.  As opposed to “I build websites - for anybody.”

I think that was probably what my website communicated for a really long time. There is..well, I don’t know how many there really are, but let’s just say…there’s a million other freelancers who offer to make websites. There’s no way that I am going to have any sort of uniqueness or stand out in Google. I’m just going to be another penguin in the crowd.

I think we all lose sight of that because we are so busy working inside the business…and on the code or the design or whatever that we forget to actually work on the business…and take a step back and try to figure out - Who we are a good fit for? What is our value preposition? Who are we serving?  Who do we want to attract? Especially WordPress developers, we get caught up on that little eco system of our community. Because we know each other and we are tight. We forget about that outside world and it’s a detriment to businesses.

And really, people who think that it might be a sin to poop, that is not my target audience.

I will never forget that, I kid you not - because of your reaction when you found it. That and you said, it’s such a rabbit hole when you start looking at data because you can lose an hour’s worth of time or two hours and not even realize it’s gone. It’s just like poof!

That is the nice thing about the data because we do have a lot of information available and it’s free for the most part.

So another question, you know there’s a lot of website owners and end-users who listen to my podcast…you know they don’t code, right? If you were to give them some advice, as in looking for a designer, a developer, or an implementor of WordPress or any other sites, even if it is  Wix, or if it’s Weebly or SquareSpace. How should they best go about sniffing out their future consultant or developer or designer to make sure that they’ve got their back when it comes to SEO. What suggestions do you have?

I think of a few. The first one would be simply to ask them what their approach to SEO is. How would they incorporate SEO best practices into the project and your listeners don’t have to be technical to understand the question or understand the answer. But they’re listening to your show, they’re reading your excellent blog posts, so they know some things to look out for and if the developer gives an answer that just sounds like they know nothing, then they probably know nothing. Did you want to chime in on that?

I’m just laughing because before I started WebSavvy, I worked for a software company and I had been doing the website development ourselves and I don’t code. I knew a little bit and we had decided that we were going to hire a professional company to design and code the website. And we were interviewing people, also for SEO, because the management of the company, was like - you know what? You don’t have time for SEO - we need to outsource that. We need you working on other things. And we spent, I don’t know…like, 6 months or 9 months interviewing companies, agencies and individual SEO consultants. And I knew more than all of them and we were so frustrated because there was nobody that I could hand it over to. They just didn’t have that knowledge base. I would ask them a question that you said, just like basic questions. How are you going to weave the SEO best practices into the process? What are you going to do? And they would just sit there with blank faces, and have no answer for us. And we ended up having to do the SEO ourselves and we couldn’t outsource it.  That was one of the reasons why I ended starting up the company and going into consulting because it was an epiphany to me and wake up call. Holy Cow! I had more knowledge on SEO than all of these people that made a lot of money that I was trying to outsource to. That’s why I laugh, it’s just funny.

You never know where small events or moments of time in your life are going to shift you and pivot you, you know into the next phase. That was definitely for one for me. Ok you said that you would ask the developer their approach to SEO. How would they weave SEO best practices into the project and any other bits of wisdom?

Yes. So if a developer understands SEO and is worth half a lick at it, that when you Google their name, their website should come up top of the results.  If you Google the name of the agency or the developer and you get a million articles and their website is not one of them, I think that would be alarming. Wouldn’t you think?

Yes. I think another one is if their price point is way too low because that tells you that they're new, they’re inexperienced and unfortunately they don’t know what they don’t know. Although, I’ve had clients that have spent $80,000 on websites and they’ve had every meta description, hard coded in the site and it be the same across every URL, and that was done by a big agency in New York. So, price isn’t always…but that is another red flag for me, is when someone comes in with a really low quote. That tells me that you don’t value your time or your experience or you have no experience.  You don’t understand the work that is involved. Yes, yes!

More bits of wisdom!

More bits of wisdom! You could asked for…I always check for references or portfolio and get in touched with past clients to see what their experience was. And you can ask questions specific to “Hey, after such and such re-did your website, did you notice that your rankings improved or didn’t improve, or negatively went the wrong way?”

If you really want to be a nerd about it, you can go to a website called github.com and search for your developer. If they have any public code on there you can take a peak at it - and you don’t have to understand a lick of code. Imagine walking into someone’s closet, you can tell if it’s a clean closet or a cluttered closet. And by looking at someone’s code, even if you don’t understand it, you can get a feel for the attention to detail or the care that someone puts into the work.

That’s a good one. Their website too. Just looking at their website and seeing if there is a  bunch of issues with it.

Even though I do have typos on my website because my head thinks way faster than I can actually type and when I catch them it drives me crazy.

So here’s a question related to developers now. So, if you had…those freelancers out there who don’t really want to learn SEO, but they’d like to be able to bring some of that on to their clients. How can they find SEO consultants to work with them, sniff them out, make sure that they good? What would you do? If you didn’t know me, and you realized that this was something that you needed to partner with somebody on. How would you go about finding them? And validating them?

I think I would hit my referral network or just my peer network of other people that were doing similar work and ask who they knew, who they had good experiences with? And go about it that way. Because I do know you, I’m spoiled, so now all I would tell somebody to do, is to go take that To The Top SEO course…and in the course of…I don’t know, even if you do none of the homework and just breeze through the topical content, that gives you an understanding and a mental framework that you could approach SEO conversations with in the future.

It’s because it’s a process, right? That was the whole point, when I did that course was to really teach a process, so that anybody could use it whether it’s a developer or an end-user because it’s been the process I’ve used. As both a website owner and an end-user, as well as  owning an agency that does web development, it applies to both. It’s just getting yourself in that structure. And looking outside of the code or outside the design to really make sure SEO is getting corporated in.

I will throw one more bit in, in case somebody, of course if they are listening to this than they know you, Rebecca. But if somebody didn’t and wasn’t sure where to turn to find somebody who was actually worth their weight in salt on SEO. I would look at anything that Google puts out, articles that are published by Google. People that work for Google. When those people..we were having the conversation earlier about Google putting out the mobile first, the mobile responsive thing. Well, that’s going to be pretty trustworthy information and so people that are associated with that content, I would assume would know what they were talking about.

So here’s an interesting factoid on Google and consultants. There are people who show Google logos on their websites that’s are consultants. That say they’ve been vetted by Google for SEO and everything else. Ok, that is complete crap. Google has been very bold in saying that they will not vet SEO consultants, they do not have the time and the resources to do so. When you see logos like that - it’s one of two things - somebody is trying to snow you to make you think that because that’s not the type of relationship that Google has with consultants. It’s very rare that Google has direct relationship with consultants. They’re very well-known people. They’re experts and they charge like 600$ an hour, right? That’s, most likely, not who you are trying to hire.

The other fact is - they are showing you certifications for Google Adwords - which is pay-per-click. That’s advertising. It has nothing to do with SEO. It works completely separately, but they are projecting it as if they are authorized by Google and certified by Google for SEO . It is completely unrelated. It drives me crazy when I see that because the average end-user doesn’t know that and it’s mis-represented to them.

That’s dirty.

It is dirty. Good SEO consultants are going to say - I don’t know anyone personally at Google. I follow Google. I follow their best practices they lay out. Because they do lay out a lot of best practices. They’ve got great documentation for developers and for SEO consultants both. It’s free. You can access it. That’s what people are going to say. I follow them. I adhere to their best practices. I avoid anything that they call blackhat SEO or that they don’t want.  But they can’t claim to have some type of personal relationship.

Yes, Matt Cutts tweeted me one time, like I don’t know 5 years ago…and I about fell out of my seat because at the time he was the Head of Search, but that doesn’t mean anything.  It really doesn’t.  None, absolutely none.

So that was, Carrie, my last question for you.  Any other just random SEO goodness, education, knowledge bombs you’d like to throw out?

Well, this relates to that last question. I was going to say that anybody that tells you they can get you to the top of…number one Google for whatever search term, that’s not a good SEO person. It’s not!

There’s no guarantees and it’s so much out of your control. We’re doing the SEO mastermind and I’ve got it for one session for developers and freelancers and agencies, but that’s one of those things you can’t promise that. Don’t let a client try to get you to promise it because you can’t. There so much outside of your control. You are heavily relying on the client to actually deliver content and do the tasks that they promised they would. You have no control over what the Search Engines are going to do. You have no control over competition. The top competitor could go hire the largest SEO company out there and threw $3 million at it tomorrow and have a huge SEO campaign that could just wipe you away. That is completely outside of you control.

So there is no way an SEO consultant can guarantee you anything and anyone who tries to is unethical and isn’t being transparent with you.  That’s definitely a warning sign for sure.

That’s good one! Well done! Drop the mic!

I thank you so much for joining me. Tell the listeners where they can find you, any new goodness that you’re working on because we do have a lot of developers and end-users both. First, where can they find you?

carriedils.com is probably the easiest place to find all of my endeavors online, twitter is probably my most used social media and that is @cdils.

And what are you working on right now? What is coming soon or in the distant future from Carrie Dils?

Coming soon to a web browser near you - is a freelancing fundamentals course that will just cover getting going from zero to sixty with your freelancer business. Setting it up, making sure everything is legal, all your eyes are dotted and your tees are crossed, defining  your target audience. Just all the goodness that goes into setting somebody up for success in a self-employed, small business.

Even though there are days that I think it is completely crazy to be self-employed or run an  agency, be a freelancer - it is becoming so much more popular and common. You know, it’s a great life because you do have a lot more (sometimes) work-life balance than you would find with an hour commute each day, everyday, 5 days a week.

Absolutely! I would not go back to the cubicle.

I could not either and I feel blessed that I get to help people and do things that I love and I can work from home. It’s a good life. And I’m glad that your part of my life.

Thank you so much for joining me on my podcast today.

Thank you Rebecca Gill and I hope to speak with you again soon. I appreciate you having me on.

My pleasure!

Thanks so much everyone, for joining us today. If you enjoyed the podcast, I’d love to get a review on iTunes, just head on over and tells what you think.

Thanks again and we’ll see you next week.

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