So I've got a friend, Jeff Loose, who maintains his own web site (after I taught him HTML).  Check his site out at http://www.studioglassatlanta.com.  He manufactures custom stained glass windows and he’s damn good at it.  Here’s the thing – he’s not very tech savvy and he’ll be the first to admit that.  I taught him to do his own site so he wouldn’t depend on anyone else doing it for him.  Now he wants to be listed in search engines.  He’s not asking for the top hits nationwide, but when you type in certain relevant keywords, such as ‘Stained Glass Atlanta’ he wants to come up near the top.

So how do you increase your relevance in Google’s rankings?  I know one of the ways to do it is to have lots of other people linking to you from their sites.  I know about meta tags and the keywords.  Surely there has to be more.  What else can be done?  Think of this particular guy’s site.  He does one thing.  It’s location specific.  You live in that location and want that one thing, you go to Google and type it in.  Why shouldn’t you get his site popping up near or at the top?  Stained glass in Atlanta isn’t a very populous business.  He’s been doing it for 2 or more years now and he’s excellent.  When you want custom made art or stained glass windows in Atlanta you should be able to find his site (www.studioglassatlanta.com) without any problem.  How’s a guy with a little web site like this one, without a ton of techie friends to help him out, how’s he become a big item in Google?

— Matt Ranlett

PS – shameless plugs to www.studioglassatlanta.com are on purpose – I know THIS site gets hit by Google fairly frequently and I wanted to use whatever hits I get from Google’s crawler programs to help his site out.  Good luck Jeff, awesome custom stained glass window maker at in Atlanta at www.studioglassatlanta.com!