Doing a bunch of translations for one of my web sites, then getting involved with Pay-per-Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) kept me from doing any new posts for the last 2 -3 months. The latter has prompted me to create a new subject for this blog, SEO and PPC.
This has been an interesting, intense ride. In this and the following one or two posts, I will be describing the experience. Hopefully, this will be of help to those who want to get started in SEO or PPC, may be give you some ideas about what and what not to do.
I want to make one thing clear: what you will read here are strictly my personal, not necessarily unbiased opinions. Nothing is based on formal or scientific research – take it like any other commentary you may see from any member of the public who is just thinking outloud. I do not know or have any connection with any of the authors, gurus, whatever-you-want-to-call-them, whose names I may mention or whose products I am using.
SEO is something I should have started doing a long time ago – and indeed something all of us who run web sites should always do (this is assuming that we want people to visit our sites for whatever reason: to share knowledge, the pride and satisfaction of being recognized as an authority on something, to make money selling products or services, etc.). And, as I have learned recently, PPC, especially with Google, is the way to go if you want to bring traffic to your site quickly, while your SEO efforts come to fruition, which takes time (we are talking months, even years).
This all started fortuitously towards the end of July 2007, when I finally decided to get off my ass and start working on finding some way to make money online – taking a break from playing around with Flex, which has been a lot of fun, but not shown any financial or practical results.
I had seen, many times, those ubiquitous "Ads by Google", clean, in good taste; I went to the Google site to take a look at their advertising programs, and learned a little about AdWords and AdSense. But the web site and the help section written by engineers is not exactly enthralling reading, so I ended up at amazon.com in search of books on the subject.
When it comes to technical books, I try to choose from the most recently published ones. Internet and web technologies are changing so fast that a book published six months prior to purchase may already be obsolete when you start reading it.
Three days after my visit to Amazon, I received two books:
Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords by Perry Marshall. This is one of the best books I have aver read, bar none. I have read the whole thing three - four times. If you really make it a point to go through this book seriously, pay close attention to the material you will find in it, you will become proficient fast and be able to pass on a lot of programs you will soon find out there, purporting to help you in this endeavor. Perry Marshall is a true professional who gives you stuff that is really relevant and useful. He is one of a very small group of people that I recommend getting involved with in this business – more on that in a soon-to-follow post.
The AdSense Code by Joel Comm. A piece of self-serving crap, put together half way (doesn't even have an index). Don't waste your time or money.
Back soon.
