To Write a Book
It is now 2013.
In 2012, I attended my first SEO conference. I also accomplished my goals of shaking Rand Fishkin's hand and building a free SEO tool which I gave away for free here.
If there's one thing 2012 taught me about my goals is that I can set high expectations for myself and still reach them :). Creating an SEO tool that is useful to the community was not easy. It took a long time for me to find something I could write that hadn't already been written. Tons of people have written tools to help them determine how many characters are in their page titles and meta description tags. Those types of tools are easy to come up with and easy to write. I had to do something different, but at the same time I had to create something I would also use myself. I already use Yoast's WordPress SEO Plugin, so it just made sense for me to improve upon what I was using by adding in Mozscape data I normally had to manually look up myself.
Now that I know I can accomplish something big in a short period of time, like writing an SEO tool and giving it away for free, I'm ready to take on another big task.
So for the start of 2013, my life's mission is to write a book. I'm pretty sure the book will have something to do with SEO, so if you're reading this and you like what you've seen so far, stay tuned!
To Create a Useful SEO Tool and release it for Free
2012, the year I attended my first SEO conference. MozCon, arguably the best SEO conference. I say arguably, because many people I met there argued that to me. Pretty much everyone in attendance (that had been to other SEO conferences) told me they much preferred the longer/one-person sessions. I was told the material was presented in a way that was "easier to follow and much better". After being there, all I have to say is - I'm sold.
One thing I noticed throughout MozCon was that SEO software provides many doors to open for SEOs. Using the right tools, you have unlimited sources for outreach. It was awesome watching these experts use their tools and scripts to produce such a wide range of useful data for SEO. Well, that is it then. My next mission is to create an SEO Tool myself. One that I hope is useful to others, but that will definitely be useful to me. So here we go 2012, let's see if I can create such a tool before the end of this year. Go!
Mission accomplished! Back in November, I started working on Yoast's WordPress SEO Plugin. What I wanted to do was include SEOmoz Mozscape data directly inside Yoast's plugin so I could see this data while editing posts and pages on my WordPress-driven websites. I figured, "Why do I need to add a new plugin to the mix? I'm planning to give this tool away for free, so why not give it to Joost if he's interested?" Plus, Yoast is a great guy and gave us his WordPress SEO plugin under the GNU General Public License so I knew I could safely test it out and make my modifications without any legal issues.
On November 29th, I released my first version of my SEO Tool. And now on Christmas Eve I have included my modifications to Yoast's most recent update. So Merry Christmas everyone! You can download the latest from this post :).
