Online PR UK & Expert SEO

I was given  a book recently : Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO and I’ve written about it in my last post (good book by the way)

The clever part of this was that Jaimie (one of the authors) had been broadcasting the fact that he was releasing the book about 4 months before launch from his site http://www.seoegghead.com and he offered to give a free copy of the book to SEO bloggers if they would return the favour and write about the book and maybe give a link or 2.

What Jaimie understands is that with SEO, link building and buzz building, are the binding ingredients in connecting a well optimised site to search engines.

If you don’t know, search engines see links as a vote of confidence in a site. The more good sites link, the more confidence - the higher the rankings. Thats a simplified version but basically correct.

So he sends these books out at about $10 USD a piece and for maybe a $1000 worth of freebies to bloggers like me, he gets our links, insight and hopefully for him, recommendation.

He knows with enough good buzz from SEO’ers, his book will reach into the core web dev community who are perfect for this book.

In my professional life I can see a growing recognition that if you can harness the love of a product or company or service and help those evangilists spread their message about you, that message will travel right into the people who you most want to have as customers.

I’ve been given a copy of Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie’s new book Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO

there are 2 parts to this : 1 the bit where I talk about the book and 2. the bit where I talk about the clever marketing they have used for this cool book.

My review

I dig it, its a really good book for someone who is a professional web developer working with PHP MySQL and has built their own CMS, or may be has inherited it and they want to get theor heads around SEO without getting into the social theory of what and why with SEO. In other words its a book for people getting their hands dirty with code.

Through my professional role as an SEO’er I’m advising a company who my employers are working with. They have a custom CMS and they need traffic since their SEO is hell (they even use an Iframe on the front page where the content goes ! ! and they wonder why google does not rank them.

Anyhow the dev guy got a load of “seo this and seo that” and all he got was bored. he wanted to know how to fix things and what things to fix. thats all. Wether the site got more traffic was almost academic to him. It was all about eh development solution. This is where this cool book comes in nicely. For more SEO you should check out the authors site SEO Egghead

The marketing thing is on a seperate post

Want an interesting number plate ? got £34,995 ? then SEO 1 is all yours

I’ve been working on this site http://www.anorak.co.uk - its my big SEO playground where i can try new ideas.

The site has a PR of 6/10 and about 68,000 inbound links and about 180,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days - so not bad, but then it has been online for about 6 years and importantly its got great writers.

It runs on wordpress 2.1 and has about 20 plugins see here (kudos to JasonD who suggested i run the site on WP

The hacking has been a mix of doing SEO stuff and making the site ‘buzzy’ - I’ll document this more thoroughly in the next week or so and explain some of the marketing ideas i have for the site, including some thoughts on monetizing this.

use robots.txt ? God loving, Satan fearing ? then maybe your site should use:

User-agent: satan
Disallow: /

If there is all Christian web hosting, then lets keep out Satan !

I ve been reading Aaron Wall’s SEO book (cool book by the way) as a way to remind myself of the basics. I was also reading webmasterworld and somehow i ended up here http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/pagerank.html

the gist is that in real terms search engine algo’s are hardcore maths with human behavior as their driver. I am lucky enough to know someone who seems to have his head around both the human and mathematical side of search engine marketing - lucky guy.

my advantage is the ’soft side’ of this i.e. the conversion stuff, content and principles behind the way algo’s are built.

I know this is a bit of a ramble, its because its late and i feel compelled to actually write something on the site. so on the theme of disconnect, how about this article $10 million if anyone can rank a poker site for online poker in the top 5 on google… yes - those big ticket key phrases are really valuable!