What's the domain you need help with?

JR

it's on the bottom of my signature, apparently I am not able to post a link.

Interesting, you should find tons of advice here, and there, some good ebooks, but keep this in the back of your mind, there are no short cuts, and there are no SEO experts, (no such thing exists) simply because SEO is fluid, what works today may not work tomorrow, what works on Bing, may not work on Yahoo, what works on google may not work for long.

The very real and so often forgotten reality of SEO is that they are a Business.

They are in business to make money, as a rule we (the little guys and girls) out here are not the people these large corporations, Search Engines, are looking for in terms of a customer.

They look for people who can spend 400 thousand bucks a month every month, in other words obscene advertising budgets.

It is not in their best interest to make it easy for us little guys to figure out how to get our little websites into the search engine listings, that would cost them money.

So as long as you keep that in mind, that no matter what someone says, if they claim to be an expert, they likely know just enough to over charge you for the services they provide.

If they promise you the moon and the sun and can keep a straight face they are liars.

But, and here is the good side of the issue, you can likely produce more results than an expert by just generating good content and using a good publishing platform.

There are so many things to learn about SEO, I have spend thousands of dollars with firms that claimed they could produce outrageous results and it turned out they produced nothing but a lot of hot air and a rather large bill at the end of the billing cycle.

Take it all with a grain of salt, because that is likely what your talking about in the long run,)

I looked over your website and I would definitely change a few things.

First I'd take off the popup for signing up to your email list on skin care recipes. It's kind of annoying when you are trying to get to your website. I also would re-design your site to make it more user friendly. And then I would put the email sign up form on the side so people could sign up at their own convenience.

Also, when I search Google for - Soap Making School - your site shows up on the first page and listed as #7. So that is not bad.

If you were my client I'd recommend you purchase a particular Word Press theme I like to use for $47.00 and then I'd re-design your site to make it more inviting. I'd be happy to help you out more if you want. Just let me know.

JR

I sent you a PM

JR

Backlinks.. backlinks.. backlinks.. the higher the PR the better.

backlinks from a reliable source is the everlasting technique for ranking well in google and other search engines.

Hope this can also help Renesoap, but are there any recommended or "a great read" ebooks regarding SEO out there that could help us learn a little more about it?

First you need to optimize your site according to the SEO Strategies as current algorithm of Google, Yahoo, MSN. Then you need Backling for you site. I think you should go for Blog Commenting for your site using Link text.
Also Create a blog on your site and do posting on them regular basis, it will generate traffic on you site fast .

I don't know what it is with SEO and why everyone puts it off as being hard to achieve in terms of serps but for me in my own personal experiences I have found that SEO is one of the easiest tasks out there to complete.. its just very very time consuming and takes patients. I looked over your site and see that the on-site SEO is pretty well, "much props, this isnt something I see very often!" However I would recommend you do a couple minor things such as linking the main keyword to the wikpedia page and also link 1-2 other sub key-phrases to some other high end candle information sites. In terms of off-site SEO I would only focus on the following things:

1. Niche related blog commenting (only a couple every other day, linking the keyword back to your site)
2. Have a couple targeted articles created and submit them to high end niche related directories.
3. Do a search for candle creation related sites and see if you can advertise on any. (not a must but sometimes it can do you a lot of good!)

For more in-depth information I suggest you read this thread, it will give you a lot of great pointers in terms of achieving good serps.