Few weeks ago, I finished assisting a friend of mine setting up a new blog running on Wordpess. He was pretty much excited with the new blog. Just like any typical beginner bloggers (including me), he was ambitious to monetize his blog and earn income from there. Well, I said, go ahead.

A week later, he came back asking why he’s not getting a lot of visitors. So I told him the concept of indexing, SEO and webmaster tools such as Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer and Live Webmaster. He just nodded his head as usual. I thought it will stop there.

And then he came back again for another help, now he wanted to rank first on Google for certain ‘key phrase’ that his blog is focusing to. Now I almost fainted… lol.. actually  I’m chuckled.

Familiar with this type of people? I bet yes especially if you’re dealing with newbies. Not to turn him away, I ask him to do some homework.

To make the story short, I ask him to read Google’s SEO Started Guide. Sometimes, the best teacher is the inventor himself.

Apart from that,  Aaron Wall’s Blogger’s Guide to SEO is useful too. It’s among the first SEO guides that I read about 2 years ago, so this is a must. At the end of Aaron Wall’s guide above, he has generously put other SEO guide links that’s worth your reading too.

During my early days of doing this stuff, I’ve download a lot of tutorials and free e-book. After sorting out the best (not all),  I had put the collection of SEO tutorials & guides as well as the  keyword tool here, although I seldom use them nowadays.

These tutorials and guides only cover what SEO experts call on-site optimization, which is basically what we (as the website owners or also called webmasters) can control. Off site optimization is much harder (and important too) but that is on another post that I’ll cover for him later.

So before you shop for any SEO tutorials or ebooks, spend sometime googling it. Internet has whole lots of information. Happy SEOing your blog buddy.