Search engine optimisation is something that just about every webmaster has thought about and maybe even tried to master. There are so many resources out there where you can learn about the subject or get someone to do it for you. Some are good and others may put you into a situation that is counter productive to your SEO efforts and cost you more than just a lot of money. The way I see it, before you decide to get into anything or pay someone to do it for you, it pays to be knowledgeable on the subject matter yourself.

Late last year I was fortunate enough to receive a complementary copy of Search Engine Optimization: Your visual blueprint for effective Internet marketing from Kris Jones. I am not a fan of reading books but I was pleasantly surprised when I flipped through it for the first time and saw the visual format of the book, which made reading and learning a lot easier. This is one of the best resources I have come across if you want to learn SEO and the book follows a step-by-step fashion and covers the following topics:

1. Getting started with search engine optimisation
2. Keyword generation
3. Creating pages
4. Basic web site structure
5. Advanced web site structuring
6. Creating content
7. Creating communities
8. Building links
9. Using Google analytics
10. Social media optimisation
11. Creating pay-per-click campaigns
12. Optimising PPC campaigns through quality score optimisation
13. Optimising for other search engines
14. Monetizing traffic
15. Installing SEO plugins

As you work through each of the topics, Kris outlines what it is, why it is important, how to do it and what not to do to jeopardise your SEO efforts. For example, in the Creating Content chapter he talks about how content is the “lifeblood” of a site how quality content is directly proportional to ranking well in search engines and customers making purchases on your site. He also covered using proper keyword density, latent semantic content and avoiding duplicate content. Latent semantic indexing was something I didn’t know about but after reading about, saw as something that is very relevant in SEO and best of all, easy to implement.

As I was working through the book, I took one of my sites and made a few changes to it. Over the last few months I have noticed and increase in organic traffic and this I attribute to the book. The increase in traffic has correlated to an increase in revenue. A bonus about Kris being the author is that he is more than willing to answer questions or clarify anything discussed in the book. I had a couple of questions and to get mine answered by going over to his blog, asking the question on the relevant post and a little while later I had a response.

All in all, I would recommend this book to anyone who really wants to get a handle on search engine optimisation. The $20 investment is well worth it and will go a long way in getting your website to rank well about the rest.

Click here to purchase Search Engine Optimization: Your visual blueprint for effective Internet marketing

As I stated in my last post, I am looking for ways of increasing traffic to my blog. I came across an article that some of you people out there might find interesting and helpful. Enjoy!

16 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog
By Denise Wakeman

You’ve got your blog set up and you’ve started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.

1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.

Http://www.bloglet.com

2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)

http://www.my.yahoo.com

3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don’t write things like “nice blog” or “great post.” Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.

4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

http://www.pingomatic.com

5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines:

http://www.submitfire.com

6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:

http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/

Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.

7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.

8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.

9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.

10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.

11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to.
The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as ‘feeds’) may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.

To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm

13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts

14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.

15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).

16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.

Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com

Denise Wakeman of Next Level Partnership, and Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletter Services, have teamed up to create blogging classes and marketing services for independent professionals. You can read and subscribe to their blogs at http://www.biztipsblog.com, http://www.coachezines.com and http://www.bizbooknuggets.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Denise_Wakeman

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