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 One of my sites uses an outdated table based layout.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.