SEO

I finally got a hold of a copy of SEOBook about two weeks ago. I would have gotten this review up earlier but a combination of Christmas and a huge development project left me little time.

When I interviewed Aaron for this blog some people asked me if SEOBook was worth the money. At the time I hadn’t read it so I could not give my personal opinion of the book. So what is the deal with this $79 book?

SEOBook is packed with excellent tips to building a great website (many key points that are completely missed by novice webmasters, I might add.) Aaron does an excellent job connecting different website publishing concepts and tieing them all together with SEO.

If you’ve read Aaron’s blog at SEOBook.com you’ll know that he often questions if he is taking the right approach to something. In the book itself he points out specific mistakes he’s made in the past and how he is doing things differently today.

Aaron covers a lot of topics in SEOBook’s 241 pages. Everything is there from logo design to CSS to choosing the perfect domain name to affiliate marketing. Is this an excuse for filling pages? As Aaron himself points out, he could have split this into several books and probably made more money.

Some readers may have been expecting a book full of technical tricks and techniques to getting good rankings. The truth is that Aaron provides a very comprehensive look at what web site owners who want long term rankings need to do. In fact, I think a more accurate name for SEOBook would be something like “What you need to know if you want to make money online doing something other than eBay or pyramid schemes.”

The price of SEOBook has been a big issue for some people. $79 for a book? If you are serious about website publishing and development you only need to pick up a couple of new ideas from the book and you’ve made your money back and then some.

When he first launched SEOBook Aaron originally had the book priced lower. At the urging of other SEOs he raised the price. Additionally this helped to filter out problem customers and make it more profitable to affiliates. As someone who does both affiliate marketing and sells personal services I can tell you these are two very legitimate reasons for a higher price.

As a bonus, you also get access to several SEO tools and a copy of SEO Interviews (95 more pages!) In it, Aaron Wall talks to several of the top people in the search engine optimizing industry. If your curious about the world of SEO - black, white, and grey - you should take the time to read this too.

Here is the bottom line –

SEOBook may not be for you if:
1) You expect a few killer SEO tricks that will allow you to instantly recieve top rankings
2) You’ve been a website developer for a few years and spend hours a day reading multiple forums and SEO blogs
3) You can answer 98% of the questions asked by new and experienced members of webmaster forums

As far as I’m concerned, SEOBook is a must read for anyone serious about web site development you need to read SEOBook. (notice, thats not an affiliate link, the above has been my honest opinion on SEOBook.)

If you are like me, you read a lot of webmaster and SEO blogs. While reading Aaron Wall’s SEO Book blog today I can across an amusing post with a bit of truth to it:

Anyone ever notice that the black hat SEO blogs typicially have both higher content quality and more original content than the typical white hat SEO blogs?

This rang true to me after reading a post at SEO Black Hat today — crossing my fingers, I hope linking to them doesn’t hurt this Blog’s Google rankings

I can’t speak for everyone, but many of the strong black hats that I know are using their black hat loot to finance a diverse portfolio of Internet ventures. The reason we are “stepping into the light” is to cover all the bases: to diversify. People get wrapped up in ethics when the real question for web entrepreneurs is: what works best?

As a web publisher myself, I can tell you I live by the question — what works best? People who can answer that question, with an answer that meets both their short-term and long-term goals are the ones who succeed in this game. When SE spammers want people to actually read and use their sites they’ll do it. If they don’t have the skills at least they will have the money to pay people who do.

Have you every noticed that yourdomain.com has a different pagerank from www.yourdomain.com?

The problem occurs because some people will link to your website with the www, while others will leave it out.

Use Marketleap’s link popularity tool and put in your domain with and without the www; you’ll see the difference.

You can fix this by creating a file named .htaccess. Add these lines to the file (if it already exists), replacing the yourdomain.com with you actual website’s domain name:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule .* http://www.yourdomain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

You can also do the reverse so that you lose the www.

I’m not a very technical guy. I don’t know what the full implications this are to your websites search engine rankings (it definately does not hurt you.) At the very least, it will make your site more attractive to other webmasters when selling links or doing link exchanges.

(For the record, I believe there are other factors which are far more important than Pagerank.)

You may have noticed Pagerank changes on some of your sites.This update, nicknamed “Jagger” appears to have shaken things up a bit (but not too much — I haven’t heard anyone complaining yet.) Jim Boykin’s Blog has been following this update very closely.

Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book. It is rapidly gaining recognition as the best book to learn SEO from.

As a website publisher, SEO plays a critical role in how much traffic you get and ultimately how much money you make. I decided to ask Aaron a few questions about himself and SEO which he kindly agreed to answer.

Andrew: What first got you interested in SEO?

Aaron: I was really mad at an organization and wanted to rank a really shoddy site for terms it did not deserve to rank for. Could not afford exposure as there was no business model, just a bunch of angst. So SEO it was

Andrew: When did you first think, hey, I can write a book about this?

Aaron: Around the Google Florida Update I started to appreciate the lack of scale in selling SEO services. I went from getting about 3 inqueries a month to about 30 in a day. Decided it was best to try to create passive income streams.

Andrew: Do you care to give us a “rough” estimate of how much money you have made from SEO, excluding sales from SEOBook?

Aaron: To be honest, this was another reason why the ebook was a good call. I wasn’t making tons of money selling services because I tended to underprice them. Generally I considered my SEO no good unless the customer got a #1 rank in Google, and I was charging rates that were stupid low, not originally really appreciating the value of the marketing and implied demand in search.

I worked for my first customer for $100, and the second site was adult and they paid me $300. They both quickly ranked #1 and the adult site owner loved me so much that he gave me a Christmas presant somewhere around $1,000 just because he was making so much money.

I have probably made somewhere into the low to mid 5 figure range from directly selling SEO services, and the same from affiliate marketing, but I have only been on the web for under 3 years still, and have focused most of my efforts on blogging and selling my ebook.

Andrew: On SEOBook.com you make it clear that you’ve got the top ranking for “seo book” in Google. Any other claims to fame you mind sharing?

Aaron: Actually, that term was not that competitive until I created my site. So on the SEO front that is not that impressive IMHO. I branded the hell out of that term and made it a well known term. To me doing that is even harder than just ranking for a somewhat competitive term though…actually helping create a search term market where there is both volume and value. It is hard to change the way people search.

I don’t picture myself as famous (because I am not) but some other things I think are cool that came about due to SEO:

- just getting to talk with people like Danny Sullivan, Jim Boykin, Peter Da Vanzo, David Naylor, Greg Boser, Shak, Dan Thies, Mike Grehan, Lots0, NickW, JasonD, NFFC & and a bunch of other really cool search marketers

- getting in the Wall Street Journal (although it was for getting sued) and then having the journal profile the company that was suing me http://www.startupjournal.com/ecommerce/ecommerce/20050923-kesmodel.html

- getting phone calls or email support questions from companies worth over 100 billion dollars and from marketers of brands that I knew and liked as a kid growing up

- and this one is probably my favorite, I used to collect a ton of baseball cards. A former major league baseball player who I once owned some of his baseball cards sent me a long email with a bunch of questions.

And outside of SEO, I got to talk to one of the guys who does some work with Jim Henson studios and made a few friends out in LA that are really cool.

Andrew: I’ve heard rumors of hand-edited search results in search engines. Do you think this could become a major “roadblock” for SEOs in the future?

Aaron: Not really. Those who automate stuff heavily already face this, and those who are not automating their processes and are thinking longterm should not be hit hard by manual intervention.

Andrew: Do you have any strong feelings or opinions about the “hats” which SEOs choose to wear? Black hat, white hat, grey hat, or a mixture of both?

Aaron: Hehehe. Well I own whitehatseo.com and blackhatseo.com. I think the whole hats thing was made up by a bunch of marketers to say something like “I am good and everyone else is not”. I interviewed one of the original SEOs and asked him about the ethical SEO / white hat crowd and he had this to say http://www.search-marketing.info/newsletter/articles/lots0.htm:

“I was there when the first ‘ethical’ SEO poked his cowboy hat clad head out from under a rock.

I guess my distaste for the SEO ‘ethics’ crowd began because I knew the people involved before they became ‘ethical’ and I was part of original discussions(if you can call them that) about SEO ‘ethics’.

I watched as a few SEOs who’s business was not doing so well at the time spring to the SEO forefront as they proclaimed they were ‘ethical’ and all the other SEOs (that did not go along) were evil spammers. Once these self-named ‘ethical’ SEOs figured out they could get clients and a following of ditto heads by claiming they were ‘ethical’ they were off and running.

Fortunately, I think the ‘ethical’ SEO fad has about ran it course, it is fading fast as a marketing method.

Clients don’t really care about being ‘ethical’ as defined by a big corporation like google(or some cowboy hat wearing SEO wannabe), clients care much more about conversions and issues directly related to their business.”

Andrew: How do you feel about SEO firms that deliver results by optimizing client’s sites for terms that get no searches?

Aaron: Pure rubbish. Actually I hired one of those before I knew anything about SEO. I knew the guy was selling garbage when he started recommending that I make an exact copy of my home page and save it under another filename and use invisible cross linking between the two locations with the keyword in the link.

I asked him what would prevent me from automating and repeating that cycle and he did not reply to my question.

The practice is common though. Some firms may go so far to run their own fake engines so they can show how great you rank in those engines.

A good example of part of the reason it is worth spending a bit of time or cash surveying the market before diving in and hiring someone. Also note that if a marketing firm calls you out of the blue with a system that seems somewhat automated offering to sell SEO services there should be some alarms going off in your head.

Andrew: Do you have any really great stories of people who got great results after reading SEOBook?

Aaron: Yes. Sometimes I am a bit surprised at some of the stuff people tell me. Many people who read my book end up making far more profit from SEO than I do. I have a category in gmail I call “fun emails” and I save some of the testimonial responses there. Some people do not like posting them all online though.

One swell chap, named Martin Dell, runs a website selling Spanish property

He is on my testimonials list and ranks well for some on topic terms in the major search engines, and that probably led to me selling about 100 additional copies of SEO Book to people who wanted to market Spanish real estate websites.

Andrew: 10 years from now, do you still think you will be involved in SEO?

Aaron: So hard to predict the future. Likely will still be on the web, but SEO at that time will be far different than it’s current mode today. I think for most people eventually it will become easier to manipulate human emotion and human response than it is to manipulate the algorithms.

I have done far better than I would have ever expected thusfar. It is hard to know for certain what I want to learn or where I want to go though, etc.