SEO Bible from Amazon

SEO Bible by Jerri L. Ledford

(ISBN: 978-0-470-17500-2) As usual I have not purchased this book, I have, however, borrowed it from the Ottawa Public Library.

This is an excellent book for those who are beginners in the “Mug’s Game” of Search Engine Optimization.(SEO) It explains what the basic concepts of SEO are, and why they are important if you are trying to make money on the web.

The book starts sensibly talking about how you need a plan for how you are going to use SEO on your site (know what you want to achieve so you know whether you have succeeded or not). A good point made is that if you are going to do this, you should use Google Analytics to collect data (again, you need data to know whether you are succeeding or not).

The book then dives into different SEO techniques like the use of META tags on your site to get Search Engine Robots to find your site and be able to classify it, correctly. If you do a “View Page Source” on this page you’ll see which meta tags I have set up for this site too. The key to SEO is the use of Keywords, and the rest of the book outlines well how to get Search Engines to associate Keywords with your web site, and how to get your rank for that Keyword up the list (appearing on Page 10 on Google isn’t your goal).

Very good learning points about Keyword densities (don’t use them too little OR too much), and what techniques you should be using in a Pay Per Click (PPC) environment as well. Their explanation of PPC is useful for “newbies” as well, I learned 1 or 2 things I didn’t know as well. I skipped the section on Advertising keywords, since I was not very interested in that section (yet), but it seems quite detailed on tactics in that area as well.

Content is king, is my credo and the book outlines the importance of not simply putting out a bunch of retread information or some hack-kneed old information, you need to be interesting and fresh to attract and KEEP readers (don’t just do book reviews, as an example, unless your site is a book review site).

The books sections on Links and Robots is again very illustrative and important to understand if you want to play the SEO game. This site for example has very incoming links and whereas my financial site have hundreds of links in which helps it keep it’s popularity. How to deal with Robots is also quite important and the explanations in the book are very helpful. The author’s warnings about SEO SPAM should be heeded, unless you want to be a Black Hat SEO person (i.e. a bad guy).

Analysis of the data after you have implemented your plan is your final goal and deciding whether you have succeeded (and how you might change your plan to create more success), concludes the books content.

Rating:

I always feel that if I get three new ideas from any content it is of value, and I view this book as a useful resource and a good read. I will not be buying it, as I have already noted from it what I want to use, but I would recommend this book if you are starting out in the SEO game.

Good read!

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Comment relish turned out to be a bit of a non-helpful plug in, as it continued to send thank you e-mails to folks it had already thanked, and I actually got a couple of complaints about it, so I have removed it from the Finance Site.

I have added Comment Luv to the systems to see if anyone appreciates adding their own posts to my comments, we shall see whether it turns out to be of any value either.  This allows commenters to include links back to articles in their comments, to show some luv for the comment. I’ll see what this causes (my guess is a fair amount of SPAM, so I will be keeping my audit’ing on as well).

Text Link Ads are really pissing me off, as this is the second month where they have allowed “advertisers” to have ads up on my web site for an entire month, withdraw on the last day, and I don’t get any money for it? WTF? That is seriously bad karma, and I may remove it from my site, if this keeps up.

I have also removed Pingcrawl from this site, as it kept causing my posts to screw up and I never really got any valuable links out of it, so I have deactivated it for now as well.

Had some air-head from a “Pay Day Loan” company ask me about Advertising, and I normally don’t even answer those, but they were asking to advertise on my Blogspot site (you know the one that has 1 post and it points back to my normal site), so I played along and they were going to pay $250 for the whole year, until I pointed out I was not going to update the site, then they asked to advertise on my real site. The Karmic part of this mess is that this is the same group that said my advertising rates were too high and that I had no right to charge that much for advertising. You can guess my response.

Have a great weekend

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Added the Comment Relish plug in from Justin Shattuck to Canadian Personal Finance Opinions to see whether sending e-mail to first time commenters causes more traffic through the web site. Seems to work just fine, we shall see if this actually causes folks to wander through my site or not.

My Alexa inbound link number continues to be static at 67 as well, which makes no sense any more, given I have many new Carnival entries, so Alexa is on my “What do they actually do?” list now.

Google continues to not really traverse this web site, and the entries in their are completely bogus links to entries that do not exist either, so that is more fun for me to chase down too.

More advertising income this week which is great, and more things to learn about too.

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on Google
• Byline 2.0: The iPhone App For Google Reader Freaks

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So I ended up going and setting up a NEW feed for this site which you can link to Working Hard on the Internet or via the subscribe RSS button on the right hand margin. I have redirected Feedburner to use this as it’s feed, but it will now be interesting to see what happens when the Google folks get around to moving my feed as well? Oh well, I was never one to be very patient, that is for sure.

WordPress 2.6.1 has now been installed on all sites as well, we shall see whether it changes anything or breaks anything as the last upgrade did (let’s hope not).

Turned off the SEO optimizer for this site, as it doesn’t seem to actually do me any good for now either.

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Evidently there is a new exciting entry in the search engine world, CUIL. I have looked at it and found that it does have copies of my old Financial Web site, but does not have Canadian Financial Opinions hooked into it yet.  I sent them an e-mail with updated pointers and descriptions of both of my web sites, but I have no idea how long it will take for them to Spider my sites.

I have spent a lot of time adding Canadian Financial Opinions to many different search engines and directories, but the amount of search traffic that I get is quite insignificant compared to the referral traffic that I get from other financial bloggers. This suggests my SEO work has been fruitless so far, we shall see if the changes I have been doing in the past little while remedies any of these problems.

I continue to slog through the posts that point to my old BLOGSPOT sites and I am also using the Broken Link plug in to make sure I fix all broken links as they occur, to make sure all spiders can easily traverse my sites. This site still does not have a Page Rank, which I guess is ok for now, hopefully it will get one soon.

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That posting was blatant readership increasing material. I think that site is hilarious, because actually the information they are passing on is quite interesting, but adding busty young ladies in French Maid outfits and introducing as many “interesting angles” for shots is priceless. I am impressed as hell by that site.

Good ways to get more traffic to your site (aside from scantily clad young ladies), is to have Evil contents, like Evil John Chow does, say like this:

John Chow dot Com, a blog that helps you make money is giving away a 24″ wide screen LCD monitor! To enter, you just have to write about it. This is my entry. Now give me the monitor! The contest is sponsored by BlueFur, who wants to let you know that they’re hosting Canada and the rest of the world.

It’s evil, but I know it will help his SEO statistics and drive readers to his web site, and he just keeps working on that too, good for him!

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John Chow pointed me at a useful Canadian Financial Stuff was all over the supplemental side of things, however, I was astonished to see that I only had 6 pages in the supplemental cache, and I have 441 pages in the Google Cache? WTF?!? Now I am really confused.

If I go and check I don’t seem to be getting much traffic if any from Google searches (more from Yahoo really), yet I am not relegated to the supplemental cache? Weird man, really weird.

It’s a pretty cool tool, all things being equal, not sure how much I will use it, but it is pretty darn cool.

Subscribe to my RSS feed here

Help the needy by clicking on The Hunger Site as well

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So I actually have tried two different “traffic generator” sites, and haven’t really seen a lot of “love” from the first one. I pay $5/month to PFBlogs.org for them to announce my Canadian Financial Opinions entries, however they aren’t even in my top 10 for referrals:

1.		canadiancapitalist.com[referral]		123		1.13		0.00%		$0.00
2.		(direct)[(none)]		119		1.17		0.00%		$0.00
3.		google[organic]		42		1.38		0.00%		$0.00
4.		www2.blogger.com[referral]		32		1.66		0.00%		$0.00
5.		milliondollarjourney.com[referral]		26		1.04		0.00%		$0.00
6.		canadian-dream-free-at-45.blogspot.com[referral]		22		1.27		0.00%		$0.00
7.		financialwebring.com[referral]		15		1.00		0.00%		$0.00
8.		getrichslowly.org[referral]		13		1.00		0.00%		$0.00
9.		financialwebring.org[referral]		12		1.83		0.00%		$0.00
10.		freemoneyfinance.com[referral]		12		1.08		0.00%		$0.00

As you can see, unless Google isn’t taking any notice of them, I am not getting any “bang” for my proverbial buck at all.

I have found another site that just started Skaffe.com and have subscribed to them, just to see if this site works a little better. We shall see.

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Not really, but I was wondering if I might get their attention with that posting. I now have google on line and checking my site and such, so that is great, but I am getting next to no traffic from Yahoo. I have registered with the Yahoo utilities, and have got my sites verified so it should be sending me some traffic, but not much (although maybe my Google Analytics aren’t taking much notice of Yahoo traffic either).

I have been looking at my domain BigCajunman.com and wondering what I can do for my $10.00 . Currently it points to a backup copy of my financial blog, but that does not seem to be a very good use of that resource. I think I need to maybe register a real domain name for my financial site, which is close to my current name Canadian Financial Rants , and use that as my new name? We’ll see.

Traffic is still ok, but I really need to find that one big step to get to 1000 hits a day, just need to figure that one out.

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OK, so I figured out what was “wrong” with my site claim with Yahoo, the identifying meta tag was too far down in the template and got lost by the robots, that were doing the authentication. I moved the tag to the top of the template, and suddenly my financial site Canadian Financial Opinions is mine and recognized (Whoo Hoo). Now I can figure out what I can do with the Yahoo site tools that they give me access to, and whether I can start driving up my site ratings in Yahoo too!

Google was back two days ago going through Canadian Financial Opinions so that is a good thing, but still finding lots and lots of errors (500 Internal server error), so I need to look into those and figure out exactly what is going on here, as well. Google is creating 12% of the throughput on my site, so that is a very good thing. If I can just get the Yahoo numbers up I think I will be smoking.

Surprisingly the Canadian Capitalist is my main source of folks wandering into my site, by referrals, wonder if I should be advertising on his site?

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