I need to understand how to take the information in Google Analytics and put that into ACTIONS.
I'm working specifically on http://howacarworks.com as this is solely driven by advertising revenue. It's quality content, well delivered, but Google really isn't giving me much in the way of traffic or ranking.
That he hasn't already been mentioned may reflect the fact that he hasn't been spending as much time writing about SEO lately than about conversion optimization, Rails security, and running email drip campaigns.
You can learn a lot from him just by reading the top few comments sorted by date, relevancy, and points: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=by%3Ap...
As an added bonus add a few keywords such as seomoz or seobook.
As a second bonus, this post contains a meta-lesson.
On the more general topic of SEO, there is seomoz's beginners' guide [1].
[0]: The Advance SEO Guide (by Neil Patel and Sujan Patel) http://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-seo/
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-s...
Read it very carefully.
I was able to use these ideas to create an experiment that doubled my organic traffic (http://whitetailsoftware.com/2013/01/how-i-doubled-organic-s...), but know that some parts of SEO are simply measured in calendar time.
The domain is great, the content is high quality, you should be fine. I would probably organize the multiple part articles a little better (the -1, -2, -3 and having everything linked in the sidebar is a little much). Any cross linking you can do will help too.
Also, I highly recommend the Copy Hackers books. Your main headline is too wordy and falls into the telling not showing. Learn How To Fix Any Car is an alternative option that would communicate the same message.
Amazingly well-produced, and covers all of the basics -- without any of the snake oil. The SEO industry gets a bad wrap (most times, rightfully so) but once you parse out all of the shit, there's some great stuff out there.
Hope that's helpful.
After you have read those, what I would do, is study your vertical. Google has, and is, becoming more and more diverse in the type of content it picks to display in the SERPs. This all, for the most part, is determined by search intent (what is the searcher looking for based on the keywords entered).
Your vertical is revolves around information and research. Google has made some relatively new changes to help authors brand themselves online. I would look into incorporating these tags.
Secondly, research your competitors and the sites that are ranking. What content is showing up. Are there patterns. I did a quick search and I got a lot of video search results. Can you compete against those?
Lastly, the web was built on links. You need to cultivate relationships online and translate these into links that are earned. There are lot of ways to do this. However, the right way to do it is hard and time consuming, but it pays off big time.
/2cents
SEOmoz has a great beginners course, Distilled has Distilled University http://www.distilled.net/u/ and following reputable blogs and sites will help Search Engine Journal http://www.searchenginejournal.com, Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com ... to name a few. If you do come across some material that you're not sure of check their research which they should provide. If they can only give personal, anecdotal results with no data to back it up you should stay away from it.
Huckster salesmen make it seem like black magic when they over promise and under deliver to small businesses.
The SEOmoz Beginner's Guide to SEO is the best place to start, as well as the whole SEOmoz blog. You could spend months just reading all of their posts.
Neil Patel's Advanced Guide to SEO is excellent once you have a few months under your belt.
Most SEO consultants nowadays preach the same things Google does: basic usability, relevant content, optimizing for particular keywords, making it easy for search engines to index your content, and relevant backlinks. You can dive pretty deep in each of these categories.
I like Danny Sullivan and http://searchengineland.com which is targeted at SEOs and generally holds Google accountable for their actions. SEOMoz is targeted more at beginners and regurgitates Google's line too often for my taste, but they do have a lot of great tutorials and videos.
http://www.slideshare.net/luigimontanez/searchfriendly-web-d...
http://blip.tv/rubynation/luigi-montanez-search-friendly-web...
also go directly to google http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&... (read any resource linked from there)
It's hard. You have to not just make amazing content, you have to know how to promote it and get the right eyeballs to see it.