Things have been quiet on the blog lately. That's partly due to the fact that my wife is due to give birth any time now, and I've been spending less time writing here, and more time with her. I have been writing a good deal though. In fact I'm nearing completion of a new free SEO guide that I hope to have completed in the next few days. This guide is designed to answer many questions that web site owners have, and is packed with tips and links. The goal of the guide is to teach you how to determine the most important tasks of basic SEO. We cover using analytics to track visitors, making sure search engines can see you site, checking your search engine rankings, choosing keywords, examining your competitors, and that's only the first two chapters! In this guide I skip the fluff and go straight to the meat. The type of meat you can use to grow huge web site traffic. I'm releasing the guide to my newsletter readers first, so if you haven't yet subscribed, check out the subscribe link at the bottom of the article. For now, here is a sample from the introduction. It includes tips for people who don't already own a web site, but want to start one. Enjoy!

The holidays are upon us, and everyone is getting ready to start sending their holiday mail. The question is, should you? The last few weeks of December and the first few days of January are the biggest times of the year for e-mail. Inboxes are flooded with personal mail and plenty of junk. Today we're going to go over the pros and cons of sending holiday mail. Then I'll give some suggestions on things you can do to get the word out on your products and services before the holidays. Finally, I'll list a resource that you can use to keep in contact with your clients.

I received an e-mail from the Wordtracker keyword software that they are holding a special for the month of November. Enter the promotion code us-annual-15. This offer code provides a 15% discount on the purchase of an annual subscription if used by November 30. I've talked about Wordtracker in the past and use it regularly as part of my keyword research. For those of you who are unfamiliar here is a little overview:

Doing SEO on your own can be tough. There are plenty of "experts" in SEO waiting to milk you from your hard earned cash and leave you with no results or worse. Bad SEO can get your site banned or worse. The good news is I've compiled a few general self SEO Tips to get you rolling. With this article I hope to show you what to look for and what to avoid. While it won't replace a good search engine marketer, it will hopefully educate a few people on what to look for.

SEO Visibitly for SEO Visibility

When people are searching for things they often type something wrong. This happens every day, and it might have even happened to you right now. SEO Visibitly is optimizing content or even better pay per click ads to focus on misspellings. It is often a follow up to a main SEO strategy, but it can be quite cost effective. While researching for these terms you might even come across a new niche of traffic to draw upon.

Keywords are a funny thing. Most keywords start off pretty vague, and slowly grow to something unnatural. For example my site recently came up in a search result for "list of seo & sem sites with page rank less than six in uk". Now that is truly unexpected, and just strange. I'm still not sure how I came up for this search, but I can say that watching how people find my site has really helped me discover tweaks. While I use tools like the Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool and Keyword Discovery to get an idea of what people are searching for, these tools offer ideas but not facts. I have seen these reports show huge traffic for terms that just aren't true, and no traffic for terms that I'm getting results on. That being said they are both worth taking a look at, but what's more important is...

As much as search engines love finding new content, they hate finding the same content over and over. Using some content repeatedly, like contact information, is perfectly acceptable. The problem begins when search engines find that several of your pages just repeat the same thing again and again.

Search engines are like gardeners. They like to see things grow. Nothing makes them happy like dropping by a web site and finding more content. The more often they find new content when they drop by the more often they check out your site.