SEO Consultant Shimon Sandler Review

Shimon Sandler contacted me recently asking me to do a paid review of his SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Consultancy blog. I haven't used his services so will be reviewing his website and my opinion of the content on his site. I am not an SEO expert (although I like to think I do ok) so hopefully I will learn a thing or two from browsing his site.

Design

The design of Shimon site is nice enough, but nothing particularly special, however for its purpose it is more than functional. Personally I would reduce the amount of borders around things since they seem to segregate the content, and I would possibly make the main navigation more prominent. Personally I would remove the extraneous sidebar stuff as well, for example I would remove the "my blog is worth x amount of dollars" thing, it has nothing to do with SEO and clutters the page (and I have him beat - my site is worth $6.4million )

These are minor things though, the site is easy to use and with an SEO blog the design is less important than the content so I think that's what I will focus on.

However one thing I have noticed, is that Shimon isn't using pretty urls. For an SEO consultant this seems to be a strange thing to have - they rank great in search engines and make the site much easier/ nicer to use for the readers. Since he's using Wordpress it would take approximately 20 seconds to set up pretty urls (see the address for this page) so I would suggest he does this soon.

Content

As I said above I'm not an SEO expert, but working with the web daily, and reading a fair few blogs on the topic, I am bound to pick up a few bits and pieces along the way - I'm always interested in reading new blogs and expanding my knowledge so when I received this review offer I was intrigued to see if I would learn anything new.

The core part of the site is the blog but Shimon also has a tools page which is full of links to sites that may be useful for Search Engine Optimisers - there are a few in there I have bookmarked for myself. There is also a Glossary page which may be good for people new to SEO - he even has a post about glossaries and why they're good.

Also I notice a trending, from the last month or two at least, towards the mobile web. This is an area I have no experience in, but it could certainly be interesting in the future, especially with the iPhone on the horizon.

I also notice that he links a lot to relevant articles on his site - a technique I like to use here as well. I also like to link to other blogs that talk about similar things. This generates trackbacks and which in turn give links to your site, and a small amount of traffic (search engines and clicks).

Conclusion

Reading Shimons about page you can see he has a lot of experience with marketing and if that's a field that interests you then his site may be worth reading. From what I have seen he tends more towards the marketing side of things than actual SEO but the line dividing the two is rather thin and I haven't read his entire archives so it could just be the way things have been heading the last few months.

Overall the site has a few bits of interest but can be a little technical in places so won't be of interest to everyone... but may well be for some.