SEO Resources for Dummies (i.e., me)

Search engine optimization is not something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking or learning about. I typically spend most of my time reading technical books, writing code and doing business development for Flatterline. However, after moving my blog over to WordPress I decided it would be fun (yea, I said it) to play around with SEO.

How I became a danger to myself (and possibly the people around me)

It all started with WordPress, specifically the All-in-one SEO plugin, which allows you to customize the meta data in the head tag of your site, specify what should be indexed and customize information per post/page, and Lucia’s Linky Love plugin, which encourages good comments by rewarding with a follow link (as opposed to a nofollow). This was like the free taste to get you hooked and they seemed pretty cool… but I still didn’t know much about SEO.

So I read a book. Yep, the paper kind. I actually won it in a contest through Twitter, so I figured I’d give it a shot. It’s called The truth about search engine optimization by Rebecca Lieb and I have to admit, it’s pretty good. I’ve heard so many bad things about practitioners of SEO that I went into it half expecting to be disgusted. Instead I was pleasantly surprised at how accessible and realistic the content was. If you’d like to borrow the book, let me know.

Next up, I watched some SEO videos from a local Phoenix company. They introduced some more real world techniques and walked me through how to implement them, whereas the book talked in general about the concepts behind search engine optimization. If you have a spare hour, give them a look.

Conclusion

SEO doesn’t seem hard, per se, just extremely time consuming and I’m not sure I have the patience for it.

Plus, after all that, I realize how terrible my links have been over the years. Phoenix SEO, Chuck Reynolds, was just ranting talking about this recently on Twitter. People need to learn how to link to others using keywords that are relevant.

I mean, come on, there are over a billion results (via Google) for “click here”… How many of those are from you?

Posted July 16th, 2009 at 9:18 pm in Random | Permalink

9 comments:

  1. Tyson Crosbie:

    I might like to borrow the book…

    Then again it is a dangerously time consuming habit. Maybe I’ll just stick to my lazy, intuitional SEO. :)

    Nice post.

    July 16th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
  2. Jim Jeffers:

    I recommend Gerry McGovern’s awesome book: Killer Web Content as he advises on how to do effective and natural web marketing through proper copy. I bought this book after I saw Gerry give an awesome talk on using Google Trends to adjust your web copy based on the natural language of society back in 2007. He calls them “care words” in other words discovering the terminology that people care about and adopting it properly in your content. Excellent stuff.

    July 16th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
  3. Curtis Miller:

    Thanks Tyson, glad you found it enjoyable. I'll put the book in my bag cause I'm sure I'll see you around Phoenix soon!

    July 16th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
  4. curtm95:

    That sounds really cool, Jim. I think you may have told me about that book a while ago, but I haven't checked it out yet. Place it on the queue…

    July 17th, 2009 at 6:11 am
  5. Ralph Miller:

    Curtis, you were already ranking well for some pretty rich keywords, which means that your content is strong enough that search engines didn't really need SEO best practices to tell what your website was about. My hope is that by using some strong onsite SEO practices, you'll rank even higher for those keywords you want. In this case, your SEO is focusing and harnessing the power of your intention.

    Nice to see you're using intense debate, btw. I like the reply option.

    July 17th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
  6. Arnie:

    Curtis, thanks for the link :-) . If you look at the search results for "click here" it sort of tells the whole story about links. Adobe ranks #1 for the worst optimized page. But because everyone links to that page saying something like "For the Adobe Acrobat Reader Click Here", it is ranked #1 in Google.

    July 17th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
  7. curtm95:

    Yea, I figured I would give IntenseDebate a shot and so far I really like it. I'm still unsure about analyzing and choosing keywords to target. That seems to be the most time consuming part of SEO…

    July 18th, 2009 at 1:37 am
  8. curtm95:

    No problem, Arnie, those SEO videos really helped me out. I definitely learned some things that were not in the book I have.

    July 18th, 2009 at 1:43 am
  9. joseph:

    friend if you want to do seo than you have to spend some time on it if you dont spend than you dont know complete seo and it will be not gud for yours seo work..

    June 20th, 2012 at 9:31 pm

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