Become an SEO-Ninja-Online-Marketing-Whiz (plus, learn to swear like a sailor!)
The ever-colourful Naomi (Marketing Queen Extraordinaire), has a really big sale of her e-books etc. on until Thursday night. Naomi is kinda internet-famous in some circles, but if she’s news to you, you should know:
- She likes to mix her kick-ass marketing advice with a lotta swearing and mentions of sex/nudity/alcohol.
- This leads to much humour for her readers and high rankings on her website for bizarre search terms. I suspect this has taught her a thing or two about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Which brings me to…
A quick review of SEO School
I got my hands on a review copy of this ebook so that I could hopefully recommend it to my clients. Pretty every web designer in the universe has been asked “How do I show up number one in Google?”. Upon hearing this, every web designer in the universe cringes. To even begin to answer that question you’d have to be more specific, like “How do I show up number one in Google for ‘cheese biscuits’?”. The short answer is:
- Nobody should promise that you’ll rank number one in Google for anything except for, maybe, your website’s name. (See SmashLabSucks.com – there’s always the possibility of somebody bigger with more SEO juice affecting the results.)
- SEO is complicated.
Thankfully Naomi’s SEO School contains a long answer in her non-complicated, sailor-worthy language. At $19 on sale, it’s the best deal of the bunch. (Use the coupon code “wood”, without the quotes.)
While I don’t specialize in SEO I’ve been building web sites long enough that I have a good handle on this subject. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to learn a few new-to-me things in this ebook. In the many online tools she highlighted there are some I hadn’t heard of such as one by Microsoft which gauges commercial intent of a website or a search term. It shows for example that etsy.com has a .87 probability of commercial intent whereas unicef.com has a .98 probability of non-commercial intent. Or that “sexy boots” has a .97 probability of commercial intent. (That one’s up for debate, I think.) Another tool to check the age of a website, and so on.
What could be improved?
- Naomi’s already told me the graphics are soon to be re-done, so if you value style as much as substance you might want to buy later when the new version comes out. The current version is fine though.
- A beginner’s glossary of SEO (and/or an index) would be useful. She covers some really ninja-worthy stuff but in a few spots jumps past some basics on the way. For example she first mentions backlinks without explaining the term. Later there’s really awesome detail about what kind of backlinks you want, but at first mention this is probably confusing for a newbie. (Backlinks are the links coming into your site. Like that “web designer” link above? That is a keyword-rich link to my own portfolio I threw in so I could explain it just a bit.)*
- The section for bloggers has some advice I might handle differently or expand on. For instance there are plugins for WordPress that help with some of the issues and tasks mentioned. But I suppose that’s why there’s WordPress SEO Secrets for the really keen bloggers out there.
Conclusion
This part’s short & sweet because I’ve blabbed on enough and my honey is watching the Long Way Round and I’m kinda distracted. So here you go:
- If you’re an SEO newbie, SEO School is a fabulous place to start. You’ll get an excellent grounding in the basics in a short time and walk away knowing some of the top tips to improving your rankings. Note, she doesn’t get into *how* to do some of the more technical site tweaks. She reckons either you built your site and know how, or you’ll ask your web guy/gal to do it for you.
- You should check out Naomi’s other goodies before you go to bed Thursday night. I’ve got her Online Business School and you won’t be disappointed if you need an introduction in this area. There’s also a brand new e-book on how to launch your e-book. You’ll need to get the discount codes from her sale page.
- Ewan McGregor is one amazing dude.
*Tip: if you get stuck understanding a term, try using Google as a dictionary. Enter define: followed by your term and you’ll get a summary of definitions for the term. E.g., “define: backlinks” without the quotes.
Posted: February 3rd, 2009 under Computers & Tech, Marketing, Web Tips.
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