The Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization – by Aaron & Giovanna Wall looks pretty good – and it’s free (I think everything is in the article/post you need).    I guess I made a mistake right off the bat, I should have hosted The Analytics Guru on my own domain instead of WordPress – but then, I wasn’t really thinking of The Analytics Guru as a profit generator as much as a forum for thought leadership in Web Analytics and SEO, and I think, Ads stand in the way of that.

Shortly, I’ll get a hold of the Webmetricsguru.com domain, that should have been mine, all along, and move that to a place where I can better control it – and what ads run against it – I’ll be happy to have ads running against it.

But it doesn’t really matter to me that my own personal Web Analytics Blog has ads running against it, or not – I think the ads actually detract from the content, in most cases – because people don’t come to blogs to consume things – except information – for the most part – why do they need to see all these glitzy ads?  Besides, there’s ways to make money off a blog without selling ads -  see a post on 5 Ways To Make Money Without Ads.

Some of the SEO advise for blogs is similar to what you’d do for any site, any content – but other things seem to be about finding what is topical, what is hot, what is well linked to, and writing about that.

I’ll need to read the http://www.seobook.com/bloggers post a lot more deeply than I just did – but I will say, much of that “hunt” for relevant, fresh, topical information, that would lead people to want to read my “hot content” seems like going around in circles, to me.

Why work so hard?  There’s so much good things out there every day to comment on – to write a story about – I follow my “gut instinct” and it works ok for me.

But, I did come up with similar types of approaches for Google HotTrends, used it very successfully on Webmetricsguru.com and drove my traffic way up – but traffic spikes on blogs also attract attention of the Big G (Google) and they have a way of acting like an arbitrary judge  – if Google sees a lot of traffic spikes – they tend to investigate and penalize – if they find anything – and if they want to find a penalty …. they will.

So, just remember – all this stuff works great … it will generate traffic – but don’t do it so much that Google starts seeing your site as a traffic threat – they have been known to punish sites they feel are violating their terms of service – which is a whole volume of stuff  they want you to read.

So whatever traffic that is generated … make sure it’s “authentic” and genuine – a real story, something that is generally interesting to communities that are known to come to a blog – etc – and Google can figure that out too, I suspect.