Now I finally bought Aaron Walls SEO Book. It’s a 331 page behemoth of an eBook and it will take me a while to review it, so I will be writing this post in chunks … bit by bit.

<UPDATE>
Aaron has recently hinted that he may quit selling his SEO Book and changing his business model. So, you may want to get this highly undervalued tool sooner rather than later.
</UPDATE>

My first take on SEO Book is that it is incredibly comprehensive. So far I’m on page 20 and have learnt a heap of ideas - not so much about SEO - but it has made me think more about running an online business. It makes me thing about things like strategy, goals, and making the most of personal strengths and weaknesses.

Allready I’m looking at other peoples websites and getting ideas for sites that are not the ‘content’ type sites that I normally work with.

Anyway, I’ll return to this post to update it as I get further into SEO Book.

You can visit the SEO Book website here.

At last I have finished the beta version of my first Wordpress Theme called SEO Simple. You can see SEO Simple in action here - and you can download it here.

The goal of creating this theme was to play around with CSS so that I could get the title of a post followed by the post text to appear straight after the html body tag.

The reason for this is that there is less code for the search engine spiders to chew through before they get to the meat of your page. And when they do, they are greated with a nice H1 tag with the post title, and then the post text - instead of going through you page header, navigation, etc..

Go to this page and view source to see what I mean.

Is it worth doing this? I reckon it is. I’ve seen websites that are listed in the serps with their navigation text as the description of their website. And this has been very frustrating when when it has happened to me! I also think that every little helps when it comes to getting your pages ranked.

I guess that it’s important to remember that this theme is implementing on-page SEO, and at present, this seams to be no-where near as import as off-page SEO in the form of trusted links. What I’m trying to say is that by using a theme like this, you probably aren’t going to rocket to a number 1 position straight away.

It was also worth doing because I’ve wanted to do a Wordpress theme for ages, and I got a chance to do the type of theme that I like to use - one with a really simple and clean layout. This means that it should be easy to hack to your liking if you want to use it.

Even the XHTML and CSS validate, which I am pretty chuffed about

I’ll be updating this theme on an ongoing basis. I plan to release a 3 column version with one of those spiffy 2 column right-hand sidebars as soon as possible (because I want to start using it myself!). Update - This is done and you can download it below.

Download SEO Simple.
Download SEO Simple - 3 Column.

Thanks go to:
Cre8d Designs Useful resources for creating a Wordpress theme.
Floatutorial for helping me to get the content and sidebar in the right order.
Copyblogger - Sorry, I ripped off that shade of red that you use for your links.