Product Description
Google Your Way to the Top of Your Industry’s great to have a punchy Web site, but if you aren’t optimizing your search-engine presence, you’re just another company lost in cyberspace. With Be #1 on Google, you can instantly put your company in the top spot of relevant online searches and dramatically increase sales. An international expert in search-engineoptimization, Jon Smith explains how to draw serious customers not curious or bored Web surfers to you… More >>
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Easy to read. Some nice actionable ideas. Due to the layout of the book it does not provide an overall structure to guide activities. I found other books which are more effective for me but this is a nice book to stimulate quick ideas and action.
Rating: 3 / 5
Nothing here. The big font size makes this the size of a magazine article, not a book. Big disappointment; waste of money.
Rating: 1 / 5
Already out of date. A lot of the free services he suggests are no longer free (some are if your internet savvy). After following his suggestions to the letter my site ceremoniously dropped on Google from page one, to page two, to page seven, all in one day. Great. I’d like to contact Jon Smith but his email is well hidden, or rather not put anywhere obvious. I paid money for your book. Now be available like David Pouge.
Rating: 3 / 5
I purchased this book due to it’s glowing reviews, I am disappointed. I did enjoy reading it as the author has a very funny sarcasm here and there, but it is too lite on details and content.
His 52 tips are worthy, but good luck implementing them. There is just not enough hard details and step by step guides
I read this book too, and it had far more information and practical use: Search Engine Optimization For Dummies
Rating: 2 / 5
By the time the reader finishes reading, dog-earing pages and highlighting important tips in this workbook it will seem to be twice as thick. It’s jam packed with helpful information. And one of the best things about applying these ideas is that the author has focused on the improvements that can be done for free. For example: “Yahoo offers a keyword checker, but what else can you use to find out more? Well, there are a selection of sites offering business-critical information about keywords; some you pay for, some you don’t. I’m going to concentrate on the free information because it’s strong and accurate, and if you are happy to invest the time, why pay someone else?”
Later in the book the author again warns his readers to “Avoid the many hundreds of sites that offer to submit your site to all the major search engines on your behalf–they want money from you for what is a simple exercise. Also you can’t be sure it’s been done and won’t know if they’ve done it correctly.” The book is filled with this common sense, money saving advice for the reader. Some of these submission processes are almost “as easy as falling off a log” to use my highly technical description of the difficulty involved.
This reviewer is usually happy if he gleans two or three good, practical ideas that he can put to immediate or future use. As a bonus, it’s nice to learn about an entirely new technique that was hitherto completely unknown to them. This 152-page volume is packed with more information than most of us can easily apply. Each idea is covered in only three to four pages that require only a few minutes to read. The logic behind the individual technique is explained and then a pithy boxed segment titled “Here’s an idea for You…” follows the general explanation of the need. That’s where the 52 tools suggested by the book are listed.
The author advises that there is no need to read this book from front to back. He suggests “Dip in and dip out, read it from start to finish–it doesn’t matter. The 52 brilliant ideas contained in it are generally quick fixes that should result in immediate benefits to your site if you adopt them. ” While the book is great for reading in short bursts such as waiting for the bus or subway, or during television commercials or even as bathroom reading, reading it from start to finish is probably best. It was for me, because there were things that are introduced early in the books such as the meaning of SEO (search engine optimization), “KEI” (keyword effectiveness index), “RSS Feeds” (a sticky site), “H Tags,” “Whois,” “Meta Keywords,” “‘urchin’ code,” “PageRank”(named after Larry Page, one of Google’s founders), “Wordtracker”, and the differences between “Hits, Page Views, Visitors/Uniques, PPC and PPM’s.” There are also some rather more sophisticated techniques suggested in this book and it’s more likely the average reader will better understand them if they have started reading the book from the beginning.
For more advanced computer literate people, there is also an excellent index to help locate exactly the information they are seeking. For this reader, one of the most intriguing listings in the Index was “Wikipedia: creating page about yourself.”
This is a good introduction to making better use of the techniques for helping searchers find your website, read your self-promotion and/or buy your products. One good suggestion will more than pay the cost of the book and for the time devoted to reading and studying it. It’s definitely a book that will you will want to scribble notes in the margins and mark the pages with a book mark or the primitive and old reliable dog ear.
Rating: 5 / 5