The ABC of SEO [Paperback]

A good book for learning what the jargon means

The ABC of SEO is good, well balanced stuff

The ABC of SEO is a concise and clear guide to the art of search engine optimization. It presents current optimization strategies and discusses their pitfalls and builds the foundations for long term success. Readers will discover how to get their website listed on the major search engines for free, beat their competitors, increase their search engine rankings and boost the number and quality of visitors.

With the Google IPO and the launch of the new Microsoft Algorithmic Search Engine the Internet is once again sexy and exciting. Post dot.com there is a new realism, the days of hubris and overpaid consultants are over. Today’s "Interpreneurs" want results. Gone are the endless advertising budgets for print and television.

The eCommerce battleground is the search engine.

Although I have worked on a number of high profile websites over the last decade most of these have been supported by large off-line advertising budgets. I got into Search Engine Optimization when I saw my own website ranking less well in results than what I considered were poorer sites. By understanding how search engines work and what they consider important I was able to improve my rankings and dramatically improve the quality and number of visitors. A side effect was that the content and structure of the site were improved for visitors.

I wrote the ABC of SEO after I encountered the same problems coming up time and again with clients. Apart from a brief introduction the book is arranged as an A-Z. This makes for easy reference and treats all points equally. The book views optimizing websites for search engines as an ensemble, not as a search for the next short term "silver bullet". Whether you are planning on optimizing your own website or are gong to work with an external consultancy the ABC of SEO will give you a solid understanding of search engine marketing, the techniques, strategies, tricks and their pitfalls.

David George has been consulting on Internet related technologies since the late 1980s and has worked on projects for major blue chip organizations such as Accenture, McKinsey and Partners, The French Education Ministry, The Open Software Foundation, British Telecom Laboratories and Reuters. He is the author of Go Web!: Dynamic Web Publishing on the PC Platform (ISBN 1850322511), one of the first books about building websites with Microsoft Windows platform. In his spare time he runs one of the most popular backcountry skiing and snowboarding sites on the Web.

The ABC of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

I don’t know about you but I have got a stack of technical books sitting on my shelves. Guides, Teach Yourselves, How-tos, more literature than my local public library. They are all useful, especially as reference but I doubt I have read more than a fifth of the pages. Normally it is just the introduction and a few chapters to get up to speed on the subject. Paradoxically I have loads of books on all sorts of Internet related subjects when the emergence of the World Wide Web was supposed to do away with dead tree publishing.

Still there is something convenient in being able to grab a book or printout to take on a flight or train journey. Unlike a laptop or palm pilot they are robust and don’t tend to get stolen. At least not the tomes I normally read. They are also functional, easy to scan and randomly dip into. How long do we normally get to sit down with a book? Maybe a couple of hours in the day snatched on the commute into the office or once the kids are put to bed. For that you don’t want a 500 page doorstop complete with listings, code samples and interactive CD-ROM - all for the great value of $32.79 saving you $7.99 on the normal Amazon retail price. What you need is a concise guide you can read in a few days. The kind of things that the propeller heads at consultancy firms put together for the suits so they can understand and talk with authority on a subject.

The world of Search Engine Optimization is fast changing. Complicated recipes for SEO success are bound to go out of date quicker than those for Tofu. What is needed is a broad understanding of the issues and techniques and a set of tools for analyzing strategies. After that, any reader wanting to know the current state of the art is best served by discussion forums, web resources and magazines. Re-heating a 12 month old dish is not the best formula for success and might actually be counterproductive, a bit like a case of SEO food poisoning! After a brief introduction this book is arranged as an A to Z, it is its own glossary and serves up the topics in bite size chunks with no preference to current importance in SEO thinking.