Free SEO Guide By Dan Thies – A Review

Posted at September 15, 2009

If you follow me on twitter, you know I’ve been reading The SEO Fast Start Guide by Dan Thies. I first heard about Dan when I joined Stompernet during their first big launch. I enjoyed is content and got a chance to meet him in person and chat about seo and work at home moms during the first “big” Stompernet conference in Atlanta that same year.

Aside from his obvious knowledge in everything SEO, Conversion and PPC, what struck me most about the guy was his genuine desire to share his knowledge and help people like me who were just starting to grasp this whole Internet Marketing thingamajig (yes, that’s a word – my spell checker says so).

If I remember correctly I read Dan’s Fast Start SEO guide at that point, but to be honest with you, I was so overloaded with information at that time that not much of it stuck. I did learn quite a bit about seo , keywords, linking, page rank and the like over the years, but it took me quite a while to get even kinda good at this stuff.

Fast forward to August 2009 when my friend Nicole Dean introduced me to Lynn Terry and I joined her Elite Membership group. I keep seeing Lynn recommend Dan’s free seo guide, and figured what the heck, I’ll take a look. Maybe I’ll pick up another useful tip or two. I went to his site, downloaded the guide and left it sitting on my desktop for a few days. I opened it one morning while I was drinking coffee and closed it right back becasue it was 100 pages long. I didn’t have time to read that right? I had sites to build, articles to write etc. WRONG

I did start to read through it two days ago when things had calmed down a bit and I have to tell you, I was impressed. I read through the entire book, let it sink in for a day and then went through it again. I have about 10 pages of notes and I keyword spreadsheet with over 2,000 keywords and keyphrases for one of my sites alone and I’m just getting started.

I knew a lot of the basics, which I’m sure you do as well like doing your keyword research, optimizing your page for the keyword and working on incoming links etc, but I’ve never developed an entire keyword and seo optimization strategy for a site – I’ve always done it on a page by page or post by post basis. Reading SEO Fast Start has been quite the eye opener.

Dan goes through all the basics (with some advanced tips sprinkled in for good measure), but what really makes this guide shine is the fact that he hands you an entire system you can use to make improvements to your site starting right now. This is one of those ebooks you will refer to again and again as you continue to improve your site and work towards getting more and more traffic from Google, Yahoo and MSN / Bing.

I did get a little worried when I got to the link building section (Chapter 6 if you’re following along). At the beginning of this chapter Dan mentions

Link Building has become a discipline unti itself and one short chapter isn’t enough. [...] For now I’ll give you a high-speed run through the link building landscape.

I gotta tell you, I’ve spent a fair chunk of change on info products on link building that weren’t nearly as comprehensive and useful as Dan’s Chapter in this SEO Guide (Did I mention it’s FREE? ).

Link building was one of the things I struggled with the most in the beginning. I kept adding content to my pages, doing my keyword research before adding each page and doing my on-page optimization, but I never really “got” the whole link building thing.Â My suggestion no matter how good you are is that you read through the link getting section several times and take notes on all the ideas that are going to flood your brain – Then get to work on implementing all that stuff.

Here’s another great SEO Fast Start Review by Lynn Terry – she makes some excellent points about the guide and the importance of seo in general.

I recommend you not only download the SEO Fast Start guide right now, but that you also that you register for free access to his forum and newsletter.

P.S. Do yourself a favor and download SEO Fast Start RIGHT NOW and start reading it right away. Then get to work and start implementing this stuff and stop by when you get a chance and let me know what you think about it.

Comments

One Response to “Free SEO Guide By Dan Thies – A Review”

Loretta says:

September 17, 2009 at 1:30 am

I love that you called Internet Marketing a thingamajig~! I just printed out SEO Fast Start this weekend.

I had saved a copy and read it awhile ago on Lynn’s recommendation, but I’m definitely absorbing it better now with the print version. I think I skim too much when I read on screen.

Then my plan is to go back through it “working” on each step he outlines and fixing up one of my current websites that has been online since before I even knew what SEO stood for ;)

Definitely a good resource, and for FREE!

Reply