Something important to remember with search engine optimization is that Google is trying to provide a service to give the best possible results for a person trying to find something. If you have a well respected domain (also called "Domain Authority") and you have relevant content to a search, you will perform very highly. Trying to "game" Google or trick Google into giving you better performance will almost always result in you performing worse. Google makes its bread by providing relevant search results, and people who work to cheat Google end up getting punished.
You're not going to get high domain authority, so that's out. Your friends linking your content is okay, but it's best to just let that happen organically. Google can penalize and blacklist domains that seem like they're spamming, and it's always a risk to ask somebody to link to your content because you don't know if that domain will get blacklisted. It's best just to let that happen organically, e.g., you have a good resource for somebody, somebody shares it on their site, and that's an organic link to your content. If someone links your website and says "Check out my friend's website!" That will have no positive impact on your domain authority.
With domain authority out, the key is having relevant content, and then you can follow other tips. You want to write content based on how you want people to find you. So, if you want people to find you because you're a Web Developer from Boca Raton Florida, write your content around that. Densely populate your content with those terms, and do not over-do it in length on any pages.
Starting with a blog is a good idea because it lets you write content that can be densely populated with search phrases on a single page. After writing content, consider the search phrases you might want to attract, and then focus your content around those phrases. Part of the search algorithm is based on density to other words, which is to cut down on people cheating by just dumping search phrases onto a page. Although the way your homepage is setup is worse for search relevancy. You can have a blog index on your homepage, but try to target specific content and create new leaf pages with that content. Putting all of the content on a single page will cause the content to compete with one another and your search density to drop. Blog index pages typically perform much worse than individual detail pages in search, when all other things (like domain authority) are equal.
After content relevancy and density, you have your meta information, whcih is mostly just the page title these days. You want to have your page title lead with the search title of the content. Don't have it lead with your website title. So, something like, "JavaScript Development in Boca Raton Florida - Tetris for Kicks," will be more effective than "Tetris for Kicks - JavaScript Development in Boca Raton Florida." Currently, your page title is horrible for SEO. If that little triangle appears in a search, nobody will click on it, and Google might even block it for being a non-standard character. But, if you're trying to establish a brand and don't care about search, maybe the Triangle achieves that. It's just a big detriment to search visibility.
Meta description has no affect on search placement (today)
but it does have an effect on the likelihood of someone to click into your content if it appears in search. This is how you can target the page to a user... Something clear and concise for what might get somebody to come to your page versus going somewhere else.
Meta keywords do nothing, and may be net detrimental, so don't bother. Some other search engines might still use them but increasingly they're being dropped.
Things to avoid:
- Link spamming. Don't bother
- Link sharing/networking . Don't bother
- Cheating by whitelisting phrases (e.g., dumping 10,000 words into your page and making them color: #fff, or the same as your background)... Google will drop your domain completely.
Most importantly though, remind yourself: Google is trying to find the right resource that someone is looking for. If your site doesn't provide a resource to someone, then it's not going to perform, and it also shouldn't.
