Bottom Line
This book covers the basics of SEO in a very comprehensive manner. It provides no guarantees, but if you are having trouble getting your site noticed in the vast array of sites on the internet, it is a good start. It focuses on planning and determining your best strategy rather than just giving you recommendations to follow. Although it does that too. This is a good book for website owners who want to make sure they are creating a site that will be readable by search engines and hopefully rank acceptably.
This book is not a panda survival guide. It was written before the Google panda algorithms were enabled, and does not provide any suggestions for how to get out of a slump that may have been caused by it. If your site was hurt by the panda changes, you should not buy this book.
Pros
- Very comprehensive coverage of SEO
- Clear explanation of the mechanics of search and the point of SEO
- Good suggestions for moving beyond the standard (and cut-throat) world of straight SEO
- Useful tips for using search engines
Cons
- Published before the Google panda updates of 2011, and so doesn't include any advice in that area (hopefully the next edition will)
- Little discussion of black hat SEO or warnings about techniques that can hurt your site ranking rather than help it
- Many of the images are small or have a lot of information in them and can be hard to read
- Very dense
Description
- Chapter 1 discusses the motivations of search engine providers and how search engines work and users use them.
- Chapter 2 explains search engine results and analyzes how the results are ranked.
- Chapter 3 walks you through determining the objectives and goals you have for your site surrounding SEO.
- Chapter 4 takes you through the planning stages and analysis of your existing site to see what needs to be done regarding SEO.
- Chapter 5 introduces you to keyword research—how to determine the keywords you should target and the ROI involved for different terms.
- Chapter 6 goes through the steps to make sure your website can be read by search engines, including domains, redirects, and information architecture.
- Chapter 7 covers creating content that people want to link to as well as how to present that content to people so that they will link to it.
- Chapter 8 looks at a more specific type of search: verticals. It gives suggestion for how to optimize for image search, local search, news search, blog search and more.
- Chapter 9 helps you learn how to track your progress and measure success.
- Chapter 10 takes a look at what you should do after you've started SEO. It covers things like redesigns, changing servers, and moving your content.
- Chapter 11 looks at the SEO industry, SEO research and analysis, SEO tools, and even conferences and organizations involved in SEO.
- Chapter 12 takes a look at the benefits of hiring an SEO firm or maintaining the work in-house.
- Chapter 13 looks at the future of SEO and what may be important to search in the (near) future.
Review of The Art of SEO by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, and Jessie C. Stricchiola
In some ways, this book is a book of old school SEO. The authors say towards the end that no matter how search engines change, there will always be a need for people who understand how to make site content as appealing as possible to those search engines. In some ways, this is true, as knowing the mechanics of search and analyzing what types of pages and sites tend to rank consistently well compared to pages and sites that don't is one way to try and get your sites to rank better too.
But in the wake of the changes Google enacted (the panda algorithm) in early 2011, this method seems somehow out-dated. It's still a good idea, but Google would like websites to ignore the search engines completely and instead focus on the readers. Since this book was written before panda the authors don't cover it at all. Hopefully the next edition will address that, but for now, if you're looking for SEO help in the wake of panda, this is not the book for you.
The book provides a lot of clear explanations about how search engines work, how you can review your site to make sure there aren't parts of your HTML or site design that are blocking search engine spiders, and even how to decide whether to hire SEO marketers or have your in-house staff work on it. If you are putting up a new site or have a site that you've never bothered with SEO, this book has a lot of good suggestions. Just remember that there are no guarantees, and your primary focus should always be your customers and potential customers, not search engines.
This book was difficult to read because it was so dense. There is a lot of information and it's provided very quickly. I appreciated all the extra details and information, but I often found myself reading chapters over again because I didn't feel like I'd fully understood it the first time.
I was also concerned that there was little or no discussion about SEO tactics that can cause more problems than they solve. While this book doesn't teach black hat techniques, some enterprising developers might come up with a solution that they think might help (such as keyword stuffing or multiple page redirecting), and instead get their site penalized and even blacklisted.
If you want to learn more about basic SEO, you can sign up for my free SEO class.
