Where To Start with SEO

Over the past few months I must have downloaded a couple of dozen free ebooks, bought a dozen or so and followed countless 'tutorials' from the ultimate Gurus (self-claiming of course) but there are one or two guides that say exactly what needs to be said about Search Engine Optimisation - without the hype.

So may ebook promoting websites start with hype, build on hype and close with even more hype. They include the innevitable screen shots of their clickbank revenue, they show us the massive cheques from Google Adsense, and make us feel like we're missing out on the fortunes the Internet can deliver...

But, if you are like me and simply want to get your website into the prized top spot on Google, Yahoo! and MSN, all that crap about affiliate revenue, adsense earnings etc., is totally irrelavant. We want traffic to our products and services, not how to be the king of affiliate marketing.

So Who Should You Trust?
Well, That's a tough question. But as a few tips, I'd steer clear of anyone raving on about millions of search engines, about raking in millions of clickthrough dollars (pounds, shillings and pence to me of course), anyone teasing our subconcious with big cheques (we call it willy waving). What you want is results in only 3 search engines, Google, Yahoo! and MSN (and to a smaller degree, AOL search). The rest (if there are millions which I doubt) account for a percent of all web traffic and so what is the point anyway.

In a very good book about SEO I read that Google is the biggest with almost 50% of all web searches, Yahoo! id way back in second place with about 23/24% and MSN bringing up the rear with 8 to 9%. The reason I mentioned AOL in the previous paragraph is because they do (apparently) handle about 8% of searches. The rest of the search engines either use data provided by the top 3 or they share a meesly few percent of web searches between them.

Anyone who is honest enough to tell me thos facts is a good egg in my book. And I'd rather listen to him/her who seems honest than someone raving about getting me into 'millions' of search engines and waving a clickbanks statement...

So What Next?
Well, the first thing we need to do is build a website! Oh, you already did that? Fantastic! Then we're ready to optimise aren't we? That's exactly what I thought a month or so back, until I started to read about 'webcopy' and realised my site content was not good enough to sell my services.

So before I get into the optimisation stage, which begins with choosing the right keywords, I'll be finding a few good blogs and newsletters about 'writing webcopy that sells'... You'll find the links to what I find right here tomorrow.

Thanks for reading so far!

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