The Affiliate Lifestyle Blog

In this review I’m talking about SEO Book, an Ebook written by Aaron Wall, who is a famous guy in the SEO world. If you don’t know SEO, it means search engine optimization–basically, how you go about getting your page ranked in the search engines.. how you get a high position.. how you get people to find you, go to your page and convert.

So, we’re all interested in that..

I come from a pay per click background, so I’ve always had to pay for clicks, which is a bummer. Now I’m moving into SEO. I’ve realized that SEO is really the future. It provides a long-term sustainable business model where you can continually get clicks without having to pay each time someone visits your site.

I like to travel. When I’m on the road I don’t want to have to check my pay per click campaigns. I want SEO traffic, natural traffic..whatever you want to call it, organic traffic to constantly come to my website. I don’t want to have to do a lot of work. I want to set up websites, get them built, get them designed in the right way, and have them generating revenue for the long term. Then hire copywriters and content writers to continue to build the site.

Back to the review..

I got the SEO book sometime in the last few months. Aaron does a great job of keeping it up to date. The ebook that I have is published January 2007, but I think by now there’s probably another edition. Aaron always keeps track of the latest changes in the algorithms, and what works best.

This is the best ebook I’ve read on the subject of SEO and it’s really the industry standard for SEO ebooks. It’s 331-pages. Each page is filled with really good tips.

Just to give you a little background, Aaron Wall got kicked out of the military in 2002, and just 3 or 4 years later he had become an expert in search engine optimization. And he’s now an industry expert who speaks at conferences and publishes one of the best selling ebooks on the internet.

Here’s some of the topics you’ll read about in the ebook. It’s not a comprehensive list, but this is what you can expect to find in this ebook.

Click here for a complete Table of Contents

He talks about ideas..how to pick your idea, finding the right business model and niche, so he really starts from the first stage if you don’t already have a website.

He goes into how to pick a product that you are interested in. This is one of the things I see a lot of affiliates not doing. They set up websites in subjects they are not really interested in, and the website eventually becomes stale from neglect. So if you are interested in the topic that you are writing about, blogging about, the subject area your product covers, you will have much better success. That’s one of the topics he covers and I want to highlight.

Aaron goes into oversaturated markets.. how to find a product that people will buy and that’s right for you and your business. He talks about differentiation, and how to apply that to the internet. Picking a domain.. is it brandable? Does it have your primary keywords in it? Picking a host..

He covers the list of keyword tools he uses and does a good job of giving us a lot of resources to check out. At the end of the ebook, he provides his personal list of all the directories he submits to. These are directories like Yahoo, Dmoz, Business.com (use promo code AVIVA for a $40 discount), JoeAnt, Best of the Web, Gimpsy. Lots of really valuable directories that will immediately help your site get higher rankings.

For those of you just starting out in SEO, you’ll find that links are very important to high rankings. Advanced people.. just bare with me here.. Aaron goes into how to get good links which is covered in the “Page Optimization” section.

He talks about how to get your website to function in the most effective way..optimized navigation structure such as “breadcrumb navigation” that will help your site get indexed completely without going into what we call “supplemental hell” (the supplemental index of Google).

He goes into homepage optimization.. How to build credibility, theming, internal link structure..

If you don’t know much about PageRank, let me give you a little background. Pagerank is the basic algorithm Google uses to calculate the ranking of websites in its index. We know a lot about this because the Google Guys published a lot of their research about Pagerank while at Stanford.

So PageRank looks at in-links and out-links. If your in-links, or internal linking structure of your website isn’t optimized, then your going to have what’s called “edges” or “dwarf pages” .. pages that don’t link out or don’t pass link juice effectively.

Why do the search engines care about who links to you and who you link out to? They want to provide the best result for a search query. The search engines want to make sure that the person who is searching finds what they are looking for.

If the searcher goes to a website with no out-links, and there’s only internal linking, then your website in the eyes of Google, provides limited value and is not really a good resource.

Aaron then goes into site optimization, how to make a sitemap, deep-linking..

What is deep-linking? For instance, if you buy links, and all your links go to your home page, well.. that’s a little suspicious because that’s not the natural link profile of a website. Same goes for using all the same anchor tags.. it’s going to look fishy. If you have a ‘Links’ page with a name like ‘Link Exchange’ .. those are stop words, words that can result in your website being devalued and therefore not appearing in the top search results. These are the little tips and tricks that you find throughout the book..

Then he goes into directory registration. He gives you a list of all the directories that you should apply to become listed in, which includes major and second-tier directories and niche specific directories.

How do you find these directories that will give credibility to your website?

He says you need to think about it in terms of the search engine. If you were the editor of a search engine, would you want an overly optimized page with no real value come up first in your search results? No.. You would want to see a website that satisfies the goal of the searcher.

Search engine optimization is no longer just putting your keywords in your meta tags. Thats something thats still important, and Aarron and I both still recommended it, but its certainly not going to help you if you have no content and links pointing to your site.

Link building.. What is link baiting?

For those who don’t know.. For example, if you get an article on digg.com, you will probably get hundreds of links as a result. Now the traffic you get from Digg is pretty lousy, because Digg users don’t really click on Adsense, they don’t really do much but take up bandwidth and bounce. But the permanent thing they do leave is links. So you have to start thinking of links in terms of monetary value they provide.

He covers link trading.. and building links through press releases and forums.. How do you optimize for the constant algorithm changes? How do you structure your page?

SEO Abuse

Now again, I’m going to stress this. Search engine don’t want to return the most optimized page, but the page that best satisfies the searchers goals. That’s a direct quote from page 13. So if you have the same keywords in your H1 tag, in your title tags, meta tags.. that’s going to look unnatural and it’s not going to work.

Social Relevancy– there’s so much this ebook covers that I’m not going into detail about. He has a chapter on the history of the search engines. Aaron provides a really good glossary of terms.

Then he goes into Spam. What is spam? What is cloaking? What are door-way pages? Why should you not use them?

Now some of you probably have blackhat websites..

Just to get a little off topic here.. Matt Cutts, who is the lead Quality (ie. don’t mess with him) engineer at Google, brought his laptop to one of the Search Engine Strategies conferences last year. He then looked up a name or website of someone in the audience. And he showed everyone all the websites that webmaster owned. Now, the webmaster was using private registration for his domains. I’m not sure exactly how they are doing it.. through the Google Toolbar or some other method, but Google is basically building webmaster profiles. So if you are doing something blackhat on one of your sites, they might tie that together and penalize all your sites. I’m not saying that’s happening now, but that may happen in the future.

Google is looking a lot at credibility indicators such as the amount of time spent on a website by the average visitor. They can do this now because they bought Urchin, which is now called Google Analytics. Google may also use the Google toolbar as another credibility indicator. Remember, we know that Google uses over 200 factors in its search ranking algorithm. Aaron talks a lot about these topics in his ebook.

At the end of the ebook, he even goes into selling SEO services. So if you read the book and learn about SEO and then want to sell your consulting services, he tells you how to effectively sell your services.

Lots of bonuses here.. SEO interviews with top search experts in the industry. Mini-Sites PDF which shows you how to build mini-sites. 33-days to online profits.. And his personal arsenal of SEO Tools and online resources.

Really this is the source, the standard SEO book in the industry. If you are doing SEO, if you are building websites, get this book. It’s one of 3 ebooks I’ve ever purchased in my life and it’s one of the best out there. So check it out.

Click Here To Get Aaron Walls’ SEO EBook

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 4:52 pm and is filed under seo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.