The holidays are a great time to sit back and relax with family and of course catch up on the latest monetization ideas floating around the web.

I’ll be spending some time in the air as I head from Charlotte, NC to see my family in Connecticut, and I have downloaded a few shows from WebmasterRadio.fm that look interesting. WebmasterRadio has weekly shows hosted by some of the big players in the affiliate marketing/SEO/web business game. I have only listened to the SEORockstars and Net Income shows so far, and I always feel like I learn at least one thing from each show. You can download mp3s, so it will be perfect to fill up my ipod for the trip.

I will also be catching up on some blog reading. There was a good thread at Wicked Fire about which blogs people read. I am going to check out some of the ones mentioned that I had not heard about. I was also very pleased to see Monetize Traffic listed by a Wicked Fire member. Lately, I have been using the keep new and clip book features over at bloglines to save posts that I want to go back to in the future. The holidays are the perfect time to go back and review anything like this that you have been holding onto for a while.

Good luck getting ready to earn even more in 2007.

In the part one of How to Not Suck at SEO, I wrote about the first steps in my mission to improve the search engine ranking of my sites. I have been working on the steps that I outlined in the previous post (reading up on SEO, CSS redesign, different class C IP blocks), and I have thought of a few more steps that I will need to work on.

1. Search Engine Friendly URLs. Instead of having my urls look like madnotes.com/notes.php?z=1, the URLs will look like madnotes.com/hamlet-notes.php.  I have been resisting this for a while, but the keyword rich URLs will improve my search enigne results. You can check out this site for code to use mod_rewrite to the create search engine freindly URLs.

2. Google Sitemaps. Sitemaps allow you to provide Google a file of all of the content that you would like to have spidered. They help to make sure that Google is viewing all of your content, and Google provides information on crawling errors and search terms for your site. For this site, I use the sitemap plugin for wordpress to automatically make my sitemaps. For my other sites, I need to recreate my sitemaps and get everything working correctly. 

3. Paid Yahoo Inclusion. I found a relevant area of the Yahoo directory for one of my sites. I am thinking of ponying up the annual fee of $300 to get my site listed in the directory. The listing should help to drive traffic from Yahoo, and improve my pagerank because it will be a quality link from Yahoo.

4. Buying Paid Text Links. While doing some research on textlinkads.com the other day, I found a college newspaper site selling text links. The links were relatively expensive ($160/month), but the site has a page rank of 8 on a .edu domain, and it could deliver some very targeted traffic for one of my student resource sites. As time permits, I am going to look for some low cost text links for my sites.

I will track my SEO progress via this blog. Interestingly, I have noticed that even though Monetize Traffic is relatively new, the site ranks pretty for some google searches. As of the time of this entry, my site appears on the first page of results for the phrases “YPN review” (#1),  ”adbrite reivew” (#3), and “text link ads review” (#8). While traffic on these terms is not huge, it is a promising start for the site.

While I was pouring over my stats last week, I came to the startling realization that I suck at SEO. As with any problem, facing it is the best option. I have decided to publicly confront my SEO demons and chronicle my efforts to improve. Hopefully, you can learn a little from my experience.

Although my two primary sites have page rank of 5 and 6, both sites rank poorly on most search engines, and my Google rankings are especially ugly. On a few of my key words, I have the number five ranking, but most of my rankings are in the teens on the second page of results. This has a huge impact on traffic. Based on some analysis I have done on the AOL search data that became publicly available, the average listing on the second page of search engine results pages receives one percent of the traffic on the top listing. If I could move up my listing from the second page to the top listing, I would see a 100 times increase in traffic. Moving onto the first page of results, but not the top spot would increase my traffic anywhere from 28 times (#2 position) to 7 times (#10 position). Rankings can have a huge impact on traffic, and I intend to make a strong improvement in this area.

So how am I going to start not sucking at SEO? Here is the outline of my plan.

1. Read up on SEO via blogs. I added to my bloglines feeds for SEOBook, SEO Egghead, SEOMoz, Graywolf, Scootle, and ShoeMoney. I realize that there are many other SEO blogs out there, but this set has a nice variety of content and is not too overwhelming. Adding these feeds to my feedreader has given me a daily reminder to keep SEO on top of my mind.
2. Analyze my sites and competitor sites through some of the keyword tools out there in order to try and understand which features drive the competitors rankings. I will adjust my sites accordingly.
3. Move my sites to different class C IP blocks. In order to prevent the gaming of page ranking by webmasters creating thousands of interlinking sites on one server, Google discounts the value of links to sites that are on the same class C IP block. Two of my sites are closely related and link to each other. I will move these to different class C blocks to improve their rankings. For more info on class C blocks and SEO, I would read this thread on the Search Engine Watch forums.
4. Redesign with CSS. One of my sites uses an outdated table based layout. The structure of the table HTML reduces the keyword density and search engine effectiveness of the site. I will redesign and move all CSS and javascript to external files.

I will be steadily working on this plan over the next few weeks, and I will update you on my progress.