Book Report

I chose to read a book about search engine optimization. The title of the book is The Small Business Owner's Handbook to Search Engine Optimization. It's a book for people, mostly business owners, interested in increasing traffic to their website. Business owners would be interested in the book because they would be able to increase their Google rankings which would attract more people to their website, which means more revenue. Anybody trying to draw people to their website would be interested in this book. If I made a website, I would want everyone to see how great it was. One of the best ways to increase website traffic is to properly advertise on search engines. Some may think it's easy to get on Google, but the keywords you create are important because you want to make sure your website shows up on the results if someone puts in a keyword that would apply to your website.

A keyword can be defined as a word or phrase people enter into a search box on Google. The book covers a few good ways to select your keywords. For a minute, think of yourself as a customer instead of a business owner. What keywords would you type in if you were looking for a specific service? It is so critical to select good keywords or else nobody will find your website. The book explains a Google service called Adwords. Adwords can provide key statistics about your website visitors and the keywords they use. Adwords can also help you select keywords and advertise using a cost per click method. This process helps you select good keywords with high cost per click numbers. An example of this is if I typed a keyword, jiu-jitsu, for example, into Adwords, Adwords will suggest a better keyword that is proven. For example, it may suggest jiu-jitsu self defense because 1000 more people searched for that than just jiu-jitsu.In addition to keywords, the book also suggested creating content pages and using them as keywords. If I had a website about jiu-jitsu and I wanted people to find my techniques, I would create pages on my website displaying techniques so that Google could crawl my website and find these pages. The book also explained how to use META keywords and page titles in the HTML code of the page. Using efficient keywords will increase the chance of your site being viewed.

I found this book extremely helpful because I learned a lot about marketing your own business. In my opinion, the internet is the most powerful marketing tool available. Not too many people pick up a phone book to search for a business anymore. Most will search for phone numbers on their computer, or even their cell phones. This book taught me so much that I didn't know so I would highly recommend it to anyone out there that may own their own business. My father owns his own business and he always asks me for help marketing it, but until now, I could never help him. By far, the strongest part of this book was the keyword section. However, the book had a lot of weak parts in it but I only considered some things weak because I had no use for them. The book had a whole section encouraging the use of bullet points on your web pages, but I failed to see how that related to search engine optimization. The book also used some small business owner terms that I wasn't familiar with. Overall, it was a very good read and I got what I wanted out of the book.


Woessner, Stephen. The Small Business Owner's Handbook to Search Engine Optimization. Florida: Atlantic Publishing Company, 2009.

Reasons to learn Jiu-Jitsu

My life has changed drastically since I started jiu-jitsu and I want to see more people benefit from such an amazing sport. Over the last few weeks, I have posted some technique videos so people can see jiu-jitsu in action. It's a great martial art for self defense and it also helps develop self confidence. Like I said, it completely changed me as a person.

Here are 3 reasons to start learning jiu-jitsu:
1. It is a great workout and you will be a healthier person.
2. You will be able to defend yourself in a fight.
3. You will meet a lot of nice people willing to share knowledge.

Standing Rear Naked Choke

Well, I'm still injured so I haven't been training but I wanted to post a video of a rear naked choke being done in a self defense situation. I posted a video of the technique being done on the ground in my previous blog post, but some people thought it may be difficult to get into position to apply the choke. The choke can be applied from a standing position fairly easily and I have attached a video below to demonstrate how.

Injured

Well, I ended up hurting myself somehow and I haven't trained for the past week. I am going to see a chiropractor tomorrow for treatment. I had surgery on my tailbone 9 months ago and the pain is flaring up again in that area. I hope to be back on the mats soon, but at the moment I can't sit up or bend so jiu-jitsu movements will be hard to do. Since I couldn't blog about any of my training, here is a video of a simple choke being demonstrated.

Armbar from Mount

Over the last few days in class, we practiced applying the armbar from the mount position. The mount position is a very good position to get in a street fight because the person on the bottom underneath you will never be able to mount an attack. If I mount my opponent, I can punch his face but he can't punch mine. These things make the mount a common position when it comes to self defense situations.

The armbar comes into play when your opponent tries to punch you. Most people think they can punch you so they will extend their arms. When they extend their arms, it gives you an opportunity to grab an arm and take it for a submission.

Click below to watch a video of the technique being performed.

First Week

This week started out great on Monday with my instructor promoting me to blue belt. I have been a white belt for the last few years so I was very excited to receive my blue belt. As a blue belt, I have to reach the purple and brown belt levels before I can become a black belt. I trained Monday-Friday (9/27-10/1) and I learned a lot of techniques in the process. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday are gi days, where we train in uniform. Tuesday and Thursday are no-gi days where we wear shorts/t-shirts. It's important to learn how to adjust the techniques for both styles so that they can be applied all the time.