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 Velocity Labs. 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?

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