SEO process blogs for beginners / newbies

Right now, I’m looking into doing an SEO course online. I’m pretty confident in what I already know, but there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be as polished as possible, although they say there’s no official training for SEO. You pretty much have to figure out a lot of things on your own. I also bought Aaron Wall’s SEO Book since a lot of people were giving many thanks and praises unto it. I learned a few new things, though. But what I have realised is that most SEO PDFs I’ve downloaded, online training I’ve paid for, and newsletters I subscribed to repeat most of the same things - to the point where I have gotten so tired I’m actually skeptical that any new ‘SEO secrets pdf’ will actually deliver any real secrets. And if they do sound like secrets, then I’m doubtful of whether this is an ‘ethical’ practice.

Bottom line : DO your own SEO tests, practice and see what really works for you. Of course, implement the core principles as well.  But I have become convinced that you really have to teach yourself and you might actually learn something that works that no one else is talking about (maybe it’s their own secret?)

I have no doubt I will discover many ’secrets’ as I continue doing my SEO thizzle thizzle.

I’ve been reading up a bit about performing an seo site assessment or site analysis for a website. From what I’ve read, a lot of the steps are the same, but I think that ultimately, the search engine optimizer must select a method that suites him. I’m using a few free SEO  assessment and analysis tools such as SEOpen, SEO for Firefox, Searchstatus (a Firefox plugin) and Web Developer.

I just did some assessment for one of the pages of a site I’m working on. The work can be really time consuming and even boring at times, but my goal is to become one of the best.

Hey again guys, I’ve been gone awhile but I haven’t forgotten you - trust me?

Well guys, I’ve been doing a lot of research on internet marketing. I’m getting ready to implement a lot of what I have learnt. I used to think of SEO by itself, but not I realise that it’s just one part of the entire internet marketing strategy that must be implemented. I enjoy what I’m reading too.

I’m learning about RSS feeds, optimizing press releases and landing pages for the search engines. I never looked so deep into these areas before. However, I have come to the conclusion that it is simply a rip off to just create a website for a client without effectively marketing their products or services online. Some clients will not initially see the reason for marketing their website, but it’s the job of the internet marketer to educate them.

Now, I want to be an internet marketer, not just a search engine optimizer. I do think it’s clever to focus on a few areas at once, of course. Let’s be honest, we’re not super people here (well, I’m not).

(I’m also brushing up on my PHP skills). There’s so much to do and so much to learn. I’m subscribed to Market Motive. They basically have online streaming videos which cover various aspects of internet marketing such as SEO, online publicity, social media, ppc and paid search, web analytics and conversion optimization. It’s really cool.

Please post your suggestions on how I can improve my internet marketing strategy, as well as your own experience with implementing your own efforts.

Believe me, this is a question that I have been struggling with for the longest while, myself being a seo / search engine optimization beginner. After reading countless pdfs, or articles about how to start seo, I realized that basically, all the information is 9o% the same. I do pick up some new information all the time, so I encourage you to keep reading to remain in the loop.

But, once I realised that I’ve got the basics of how or where to start search engine optimization, the only thing left to do was start seo! I still get nervous sometimes thinking how I just can’t compare to the big names out there. But I have to implement what I have learned in order to see the results.

I also started to read up on internet marketing. Who knew that I was actually doing some internet marketing all along - search engine optimization, blogging, social networking etc.? See, it’s all kinda intertwined - kinda. But reading up on internet marketing has given me a few new ideas to try out, and when I implement them, I’ll be happy to share them with you.

Keep reading, and please offer comments and ideas on how you’re getting through with your SEO campaign as a beginner. Remember, this is the spot for seo beginners to get in on some action with each other.

I’d just like to take a moment to say thanks to my few, new users. And the list goes a little something like this:

• adol77dai51
• bigdaddy
• kain91
• lex
• nadaje.com

Just big up yourselves. You made a girl really happy. Hope you enjoy what I have to offer.

I’m teaching myself Flash CS3. So far it’s great. I learned to do some Flash animations before, but I never kept practicing,  so I forgot how. Now I started all over, and I’m getting to the good parts.

I’m actually thinking of building a mostly Flash website and optimize it. See how SEO and Flash really works. I was thinking of taking a drawing class too. Cuz for now, I can only draw stick people. It’s a good thing because I’ll be expanding my reach, instead of just sticking to search engine optimization.

I’ve recently started a journey, to see if I can get a better idea of how the search engines rank pages. I’m basically comparing the position of different search terms in the different engines. I mean I have already started to see differences, for instance, why would one site show up number 1 on Google and number 11 on Yahoo!? I think it all has to do with the search engine’s ranking algorithm - the secret that so many of us lust after. I think this is gonna require ongoing research. Sometimes it seems so futile and I’m not expecting to have the complete ranking algorithms figured out (that might beee tooo eaasy, wouldn’t it?), but I think it is possible to notice subtle differences if one just keeps his eye on the prize.

Technorati Tags: how search engines index pages, ranking algorithm

I recently had a problem with my wordpress permalink.
My blogs wouldn’t show up. On my home page, all my blogs appeared (10 posts per page), with all the links on the side menu etc. But as soon as I clicked on any link on my home page, or any blog heading to see that blog on a page by itself, the page was completely BLANK. NOTHING appeared. I viewed the page source and nothing. It’s like the page didn’t exist at all.

I didn’t understand why this was happening, because I posted my latest blog last week, and my blog rss feed URL and all my other blogs were showing up when I clicked the heading.

Luckily, I got help from the Wordpress support forum. I was really pleased. Basically what I did was reset my Wordpress permalink structure to default. I checked the page  and the blogs were showing up again. I put back my custom permalink structure just to make sure all wasn’t lost and this time, everything was still fine.

Wew! Obviously this could have really screwed up my SEO efforts. Let’s say someone bookmarked one (or many) of my blogs or some blogs had been indexed by the search engines. I would have been screwed if my custom  permalink structure didn’t work because that would have meant that the URL didn’t exist anymore. Someone goes to the link of one of my blogs and sees blank.

I am now convinced that the long tail keyword search really works, when a user wants specific information. If he / she wants to find the information, he / she will refine the keyphrase search term to get a satisfactory search engine result.

Yesterday, I was just trying to figure out what keywords and keyphrases a site that I’m SEO ‘ing ranks well for. I typed “sexy college girls in miami” in the Google search engine and the site came up at number 64. Not so bad, considering my major on page search engine optimization / seo efforts were really started just a few weeks ago for that website. But what I found is that that Google took the text from an image alt tag not right at the top of the page - ‘access to college girls on DVDs’. The only words that matched my searched keyphrase were ‘college’ and ‘girls’. ‘Miami’ was in another alt text four images after. The description in the search results for my search all came from the alt text in consecutive images.

I mean, for the professional SEO people this might be nothing. For a beginner like me, it is a discovery. Seeing for myself how the long tail keyword really does work reinforced what they say - you have to try things out to see the result for yourself.

Technorati Tags: SEO long tail keyword search, Google results, image alt tags

This is a log of what happened:

20 Sept 07
SEO mommy wordpress blog feed URL was showing error for past few weeks:

1. the blog summaries were not showing up in the feed
2. i kept getting an error message
3. i checked with the W3c validator and it found 6 errors on that page
4. (a few weeks ago, I guess to try to see if i could fix the problem, i  made a copy of the blog/wp-includes/feed-rss.php file on the server by making a copy, and renaming it blog/wp-includes/feed-rss-original.php.)
5.  Today i changed the file from (feed-rss-original.php) to its original name (feed-rss.php)
6. now the URL works, but my past entries still don’t show up under www.seomommy.com/blog/feed
7. I have to fix this problem
8. I added a test post to see whether it and my previous posts would show up since recently it looked like my last few posts were not being recognized. (I did something with the wordpress system recently and honestly i can’t remember the whole story…..)
9. Anyway, I created and saved a ‘test’ post and the test post showed up with the previous posts. I guess it just took a few minutes to work
10. The first few posts don’t show up and there’s no ‘previous posts’ link to them.
11. I deleted the test post and refreshed the feed page and the posts show up. (Again, the first few posts don’t show up and there’s no ‘previous posts’ link to them.)
12. I checked the feed URL in the W3C validator again and this time “This Page Is well-formed XML!”

Conclusion:

• I think that because I had messed with the names of the original file (although I just renamed the original files and made copies of them) that everything got messed up. Maybe the system was programmed to deal only with the originals.
• This is my conclusion because as soon as i changed the original file names back to their original names, the problem was fixed.

Note: I did a similar file name change to feed-rss2-comments.php and it showed an error as well. Then i renamed that particular file as it was before and now the comments from blogs posted are showing.

Can you believe. This problem started weeks ago and I thought I had to get the help of a technical guy to help me figure this one out. I don’t even know how/why I ended up thinking of giving the files their original names back. I don’t understand all the technicalities, but hey I did it, and it WORKED! The feeling of accomplishing someone on your own. WOW!