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.