About SEO Book.com:

Who is SEO Book?

SEO Book.com was a leading SEO website founded in 2003 by Aaron Wall. The thesis for the site was that blogs were overrepresented on the link graph & got a disproprtionate share of attention, so what if one used a blog to keep up with industry news and promote anything else.

Back in the day you could have an average(ish) site and attach a blog to it and be #1 or #2 in almost any market. This was true even if you did not look at the camera during pictures.

Eventually social networks displaced blogs. Google bought out feed syndication service Feedburner & launched Google Reader. Google Reader being a free and ad-free offering that consolidated feed reading accelerated the irrelevance of blogs when Google pulled the plug on Google Reader after causing most of the competing services to go under. Does anyone remember Bloglines?

In addition to offering a blog this site at one point sold an ebook that sold more copies than most print business books published by big book publishers. In fact, multiple big book publishers wanted me to write a book for them, but I did not as the economics did not really work out too well for the author unless the book is a business card for consulting businesses. Getting $1.5 of every $30 book sale requires way more volume than getting $76 of every $79 ebook sale.

The ebook was regularly updated, which was both a free recurring service for many years and something that differetiated the ebook from all print books covering SEO. Piracy meant that orders of magnitude more people read the ebook than bought it, and many who read a pirated version likely went on to buy the most up to date version for sale (the time it takes to read a book is typically far more expensive than the cost of buying a book).

As SEO grew more complex this site offered a variety of free and paid tools. We have a full time developer we have worked with for well over a decade. Eric Covino and Peter Da Vanzo also helped write many of the blog posts and answered questions along with a handful of great mods like Debra Mastaler and Stever in the community forums.

Algorithmic complexity creates edge cases.

The ebook kept getting larger, and nobody wanted to read a 34,837 page ebook, so the site shifted away from a linear ebook guide model toward offering interactive forums, a newsletter, and topical training guides.

We had a number of Fortune 500 customers (and did consulting for a trillion Dollar company), though the vast majority of our customers were affiliates. Some of the Google updates in the early 2010s (Vince, Panda, Penguin) killed off most of the affiliate marketing industry (or at least most of the SEO-driven affiliate marketing industry).

My wife met me by buying my ebook & then when I gave a quick free consult with her initially my feedback on ways to improve her site design were a bit blunt but then we started chatting regularly, had lots in common, eventually met in person, and it has been a bit of a roller coaster with the volatility in search. She underwent IVF and I shut down our membership site in advance of the pregnancy so I could walk with her daily during pregnancy for the health benefits of her and our daughter to be.

At the time the intent was to shut the membership area of the site down temporarily, but as the years gone by I never really wanted the lifestyle of dealing with customer support again. And if a site is 90% of your working hours and 5% of your income then you are probably better off playing lots of basketball and growing the more meaningful & economically viable businesses.

Press:

We have been mentioned in niche online and print marketing publications like iMediaConnection and Marketing News, as well as popular tech sites like Slashdot and TechCrunch, right on through to large mainstream news publications like The Wall Street Journal, The London Times, Wired, USA Today, BusinessWeek, Business2.0, Time Magazine, The Register, MSNBC, and The Guardian. A few examples:

• The Wall Street Journal: In Search of Traffic - also offers a podcast interview interview conducted by Kelly Spors.
• Forbes: Condemned To Google Hell

Some of our other projects, like our meta search engine, have been referenced by college libraries and given awards like the JournalismNet pick of the week. We also co-founded the blog review network ReviewMe, but sold our interest in that company in early 2007.

In addition to blogging, speaking at conferences, and participating in many search marketing communities, we consult for numerous clients, and publish many websites that are driven by the search based economy. We have a vested interest in a wide array of websites that allow us to keep an eye on both the free and paid sides of search, while testing some of the latest cutting edge marketing techniques on our own sites. Our publishing business (led by my wife) and the SEO Book site have a symbiotic relationship.

Having literally written the book on search engine optimization we know the industry inside out. Our book has been used as course text for MBA classes and we have spoken around the world at industry conferences and schools about search engine optimization and internet marketing. Alexa ranked SEO Book.com as being one of the top 10,000 most popular websites.