A.  Of course anyone can build a web site.  There are many platforms that make it easy to build a nice looking website.  Sites like Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and even many of the big hosting companies like Godaddy offer a drag and drop, template driven web site.  But creating a site isn’t the only factor you should consider.  If you are planning on ranking your site in Google, you may want to rethink using one of these sites.  They typically don’t perform well in the search engines. The other problem with sites like these is that you are locked into them forever.  Because the design platform is proprietary to each site, you cannot move the site to another hosting platform.  That means you will have to scrap the site and build a new one somewhere else.

A.  Most hosting plans offer what they call an SEO plan.  But most only provide a guideline for simplistic on page optimization.  Today, SEO is far more complex and requires human attention rather than something software can do.  Many hosting companies’ SEO programs are billed monthly on an ongoing basis.  It’s far better to put your budget toward a content generation strategy.

A.  with a new website (one that didn’t exist prior), you shouldn’t expect to see your site rank consistently for 3 to 6 months.  Google puts a new website into their “sandbox” so the web site can prove it’s importance.  The more content you generate, local reviews you receive, social signals you generate and more, the faster your site gets on Google’s radar.

A.  Meta tag keywords were a very effective technique — 10 years ago.  But with the evolution of SEO has made that obsolete.  The only meta data that’s still important are the Title tag and the meta description.  The meta description doesn’t directly benefit SEO rankings but it’s the descriptor below your site title in a Google search. 

A.  With today’s dynamic search and geo-targetting, local search results vary from location to location.  A search for the same keyword phrase on one side of town will return one result, while a different result may be displayed in another location.  That’s because Google tries to provide search results near your location whenever possible.