I have been reviewing my seo strategy for the my own website https://www.stevesims.com and I',m still reading a lot of PBN's (private blog networks) and how setting one up/getting links from a pbn is a great way of improving your Google rankings.

I've seen this on the web in recent blog posts, courses at Udemy and in e-books, but to my mind they are not good places to place links to your site.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the above and if pbn's should be considered as part of your seo strategy in 2018?

Your problem is you are targeting a very competitive market so the chances of ranking for anything generic is going to be tough. A PBN isn't going to make a lot of difference.

What does make a difference in 2018 is really working on your on-site optimisation.

There are all sorts of things you could do to your site to make it stand out from the crowd. At the moment it's very generic and looks like a zillion other developer websites.

You are #1 for 'affordable website design' but how many people actually search for that phrase? How many people know if they want a responsive site or a responsive wordpress site? Most of the homepage content is about you and not about the things people search for.

I know you didn't ask for a review but reworking the homepage content (and getting rid of those annoying animations) would start to help your ranking for a wider range of keywords.

Look here for example: https://www.stevesims.com/portfolio/small-business-websites/business-consultancy-website-design.htm there is almost nothing for Google to index. You could have written hundreds of words and added a whole bunch of images and lists and stats and whatever and made it a really rich page.

Thank you for your reply, althoiugh we've gone a bit off topic.

The page you have mentioned is a portfolio page. I'm not to hot on what to mention on such pages and try to keep them brief. It does appear on Google page 2, so Google must be indexing something, but I understand what you are saying.

Re pbn's, I assume they should perhaps be avoided?

See https://neilpatel.com/blog/private-blog-networks/

I enjoyed nosing round your site while I had my coffee Steve. Good Job!

I'm also in the West

55 minutes ago, Steve Sims said:

The page you have mentioned is a portfolio page. I'm not to hot on what to mention on such pages and try to keep them brief. It does appear on Google page 2, so Google must be indexing something, but I understand what you are saying.

Do it right and you don't need a PBN. If the portfolio page was full of useful stuff it would rank on page one for lots of useful keywords.

57 minutes ago, Steve Sims said:

Re pbn's, I assume they should perhaps be avoided?

Yes. Unless you have the time and skills to build and maintain them (they take a lot of work).