When I was at WordCamp Seattle this past September, I met a fellow named Ian Lurie.  You need to meet him too, through his blog Conversation Marketing.  Ian makes web marketing and SEO quite sane, and does it with a sense of humour.

Ok, he’s in Seattle so he does it with a sense of humor, but the point is, you’ll learn a lot about how to make your website intelligible to the search engines without some SEO “expert” taking your content and mangling it into something unintelligible to real people (but it’s “keyword rich” don’t you know!).

A great place to start is Ian’s e-book The Fat Free Guide to SEO Copywriting which is packed with simple tips for writing “quality copy that search engines will like.”  Quick example:  I have a bad habit of making “cute” headlines for my blog posts.  I’m trying to be clever and while I hope readers get the connection to the content of the post, search engines won’t (they’re bright, but not as bright as my readers), so I need to be more descriptive and less clever (but if I can have a cleverly descriptive title, all the better).

Once you’ve digested that, you can move on to the main course:  Conversation Marketing – the book.  This is a detailed look at developing your internet marketing strategy – you do have one don’t you?  Either way, this book will help you develop one or make your current one even better.