I was planning to develop an information product to teach WordPress blog owners all about SEO with a particular emphasis on how to setup the various plugins and settings of WordPress.

As part of my research I began to look at the various products already out there, I was feeling quite good, the majority of products were generic seo not wordPress specific so I thought I had a good chance of finding a market niche.

That was until I found out that Michael Martine of Remarkablogger fame had already beaten me to the market with his e-book and webinars product WordPress SEO Secrets.

I was very downhearted I had done a lot of research for my own e-book and so I decided to download and read Michael’s work to see if I was going to continue with my info product, and the answer is no.

Mr Martine has done such a thorough job I don’t see the point in writing a wordpress seo book, I am just going to tell you about his instead and encourage you to buy it if you are looking to improve your WordPress seo.

Who Is Michael Martine

Michael is one of those bloggers who is always being talked about by other cool bloggers.  He gets mentioned in one of those name dropping list, you know what I mean:

I was tweeting with Naomi, Dazza, Dav-o, Yaro and Mike the other day and we decided to re-write the paradigm of how you live

He gets mentioned a) because he knows his shit b) The content he produces for free on this blog and for a fee via his information products is first rate.

I’m a subscriber to his blog and I rate what he has to say very highly.  This is why I was a little down when I saw I woudl be competing with him in WordPress seo info product circles.

Who Is SEO Secrets For?

I’ll cut and paste the section from the book that tells  you exactly that:

WordPress SEO Secrets is for bloggers using WordPress. No other blogging systems are covered
in this book. You still might get some great info if you‘re using Blogger or TypePad, but none of
the step-by-step instructions cover those blogging platforms. Only WordPress. Why? Because
WordPress is far more customizable and controllable than the other guys. Between the zillions
of themes for its design and bazillions of plugins for its functionality, WordPress WINS for SEO.
Period.

WordPress SEO Secrets is for beginners who aren‘t afraid to learn new stuff and get their hands
dirty. I‘m not going to talk down to you, but I am going to assume you‘re computer and internet
literate. You should know a little HTML. If you have already been learning about SEO,
WordPress SEO Secrets will help fill in some gaps at both the conceptual and at the practical
levels. If you‘re more advanced, it will at least confirm what you already know (hopefully with
some great tips and tools you hadn‘t yet encountered).

WordPress SEO Secrets – Michael Martine

My Review

So here us my review of WordPress SEO Secrets., all links are affiliate links, I think I deserve a few quid for my research 🙂

The product comes in two formats, the book only version, which I bought, costs $47 or the book and a series of acompanying audio and video walkthroughs of how to implement the changes required which costs $127.

The book is only 38 pages long (mine was going to be 39, so much more value) but it is packed with focused WordPress seo tips.  It talks about the plugins you need for best result,  something I touched upon in my All In One SEO Pack review.

WordPress SEO Secrets also goes into some detail about changing your permalinks, keyword density in posts and it also talks  about offsite SEO techniques, keyword research and the various tools available to help your SEO efforts.

The most striking thing about this book is the ongoing statements that SEO should be secondary to quality content, I cannot agree more, you are not writing for a search engine or for a click, you are writing for real people.  If you can solve someones problem, then they are engaged and more likely to come back and click on your adsense links, buy your info product or take out your wordpress coaching services.  Write for people first then tweak it for the search engines to give your content a nudge in the right direcion..

Did I learn something new from this e-book? The answer is  yes.  Something I had not considered but will now is my outbound linking strategy, if you link to poor quality sites you will, by association, be treated as a poor quality site, if you link to authoratitive and quality sites, that will rub off on you too.

Are there any downsides to this book, yes, you need a certain level of technical skill to implement any of the changes recommended, my second small concern is that whilst it has razor sharp focus on WordPress SEO, some of the more general SEO topics are treated lightly.  My recommendation, read Naomi Dunfords Seo School first (Parental guidance she swears like a trooper), this can be your SEO primer, then move onto the more involved aspects of WordPress SEO Secrets. which is designed specifically for WordPress owners.

Here is my key recommendation, I use the techniques Michael talks about here at wpdude and I know they work, I rank for the keywords I want.  I was planning to write this very same information product, I coach my clients on wordpress seo using these techniques.  This is what you need to do.

Funny story – I bought a copy of the e-book, but unfortunately I had set a cookie on my affiliate link before I bought it.  This then generated a commission sale for me.  Not long after the download an email drops into my box from Mr Martine, clearly unhappy that I had used my own affilaite link to buy his product and thereby get a discount.  He wanted to know what was going on.  Tail between legs I ‘fessed up what I was doing.  He seemed okay with that, but that is definetly not the way you want to be having first contact with an influential member of your niche.

Back To The Drawing Board

So it’s back to the drawing board researching my own info product, but if you want to learn how to optimuse your wordpress blog to get the maximum amount of organic search traffic then I recommend WordPress SEO Secrets.

It comes with a 100% money back guarantee, so there is nothing to loose, only organic search traffic to gain.