Can someone point me to some decent, relevant SEO resources? I feel like I'm behind the times here.
I need to understand how to take the information in Google Analytics and put that into ACTIONS.
I'm working specifically on http://howacarworks.com as this is solely driven by advertising revenue. It's quality content, well delivered, but Google really isn't giving me much in the way of traffic or ranking.
Patrick is likely sleeping (it's 3am in Japan), and modesty may prevent him from saying so, but he (patio11) is the most readable, and thus most useful, person writing about SEO here.
That he hasn't already been mentioned may reflect the fact that he hasn't been spending as much time writing about SEO lately than about conversion optimization, Rails security, and running email drip campaigns.
Avinash Kaushik's books "Web Analytics: An Hour a Day" (beginner) and "Web Analytics 2.0" (advanced) are often recommended as accurate and comprehensive no-nonsense books.
On the more general topic of SEO, there is seomoz's beginners' guide [1].
I seem to remember you mentioning this before (maybe something about converting a relative's out of print book into this site?), is it fairly new? Google usually takes a while to begin referring to evergreen content (things that aren't current events).
The domain is great, the content is high quality, you should be fine. I would probably organize the multiple part articles a little better (the -1, -2, -3 and having everything linked in the sidebar is a little much). Any cross linking you can do will help too.
Complete the meta description. Get an H1 tag on there that relates to the theme of the homepage. 486 links on the homepage! Yikes. Instead of putting all of those links on the homepage, link to the different categories where you can then include more links.
Also, I highly recommend the Copy Hackers books. Your main headline is too wordy and falls into the telling not showing. Learn How To Fix Any Car is an alternative option that would communicate the same message.
Amazingly well-produced, and covers all of the basics -- without any of the snake oil. The SEO industry gets a bad wrap (most times, rightfully so) but once you parse out all of the shit, there's some great stuff out there.
There a lot of great resources out there. I recommend taking a look at SEOmoz.org. They have a great beginners guide. Also, Google has a guide to SEO as well which has some good tidbits and takeaways.
After you have read those, what I would do, is study your vertical. Google has, and is, becoming more and more diverse in the type of content it picks to display in the SERPs. This all, for the most part, is determined by search intent (what is the searcher looking for based on the keywords entered).
Your vertical is revolves around information and research. Google has made some relatively new changes to help authors brand themselves online. I would look into incorporating these tags.
Secondly, research your competitors and the sites that are ranking. What content is showing up. Are there patterns. I did a quick search and I got a lot of video search results. Can you compete against those?
Lastly, the web was built on links. You need to cultivate relationships online and translate these into links that are earned. There are lot of ways to do this. However, the right way to do it is hard and time consuming, but it pays off big time.
I'd love to know some good resources on this topic too. Feels too much like black magic, only passed on when you join the magic circle. Though I'm convinced there must be some good, reliable, trustworthy and relevant resources out there somewhere! It's just hard to discern the good from the bad when you're uninformed. Would love for someone in the know to enlighten us
The best way to avoid the snake oil is to stay away from learning on forums, especially black hat forums. Most often the OP have some 'amazing trick' they discovered that will make lightning come from the sky and shoot your site up to the top of Google, you just to buy a tool that they so happen to make. Most often than not they don't work or only work a lil bit but may come back to bite you on the end.
SEOmoz has a great beginners course, Distilled has Distilled University http://www.distilled.net/u/ and following reputable blogs and sites will help Search Engine Journal http://www.searchenginejournal.com, Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com ... to name a few. If you do come across some material that you're not sure of check their research which they should provide. If they can only give personal, anecdotal results with no data to back it up you should stay away from it.
Most SEO consultants nowadays preach the same things Google does: basic usability, relevant content, optimizing for particular keywords, making it easy for search engines to index your content, and relevant backlinks. You can dive pretty deep in each of these categories.
I like Danny Sullivan and http://searchengineland.com which is targeted at SEOs and generally holds Google accountable for their actions. SEOMoz is targeted more at beginners and regurgitates Google's line too often for my taste, but they do have a lot of great tutorials and videos.
Good SEO is less black magic, and more best practices just like there are best practices for web usability, best practices for email newsletters, and best practices for writing code.
Huckster salesmen make it seem like black magic when they over promise and under deliver to small businesses.
The SEOmoz Beginner's Guide to SEO is the best place to start, as well as the whole SEOmoz blog. You could spend months just reading all of their posts.
Neil Patel's Advanced Guide to SEO is excellent once you have a few months under your belt.
Exactly. It's easy to "copy" the backlink profile of a site using gimmicks such as blog comments and mass article submissions. But when a site is doing SEO right, when you look at their backlink profile you'll go "How the hell did they manage to get that link?!"
It's hard. You have to not just make amazing content, you have to know how to promote it and get the right eyeballs to see it.
I need to understand how to take the information in Google Analytics and put that into ACTIONS.
I'm working specifically on http://howacarworks.com as this is solely driven by advertising revenue. It's quality content, well delivered, but Google really isn't giving me much in the way of traffic or ranking.