Andrew King has been the leader in website optimization for years now. And up until recently, that meant that if you needed your site to be fast, you wanted Andy to analyze your site. But with this book Andy shows that there is so much more to website optimization than just how fast your pages download. Even SEO is only a portion of this book. If you're trying to build or maintain an enterprise-class corporate website, then you need this book. In it you'll learn how to build and maintain a site that grabs customers and keeps them.
Section 1: Search Engine Marketing Optimization
The first part of the book covers search engine marketing optimization. Yes, there are other books out there that cover more about SEO than this one does, but Andy boils the information down into some of the most important aspects of SEO work. My favorite part is where he talks about the most common barriers to SEO. If you do no other SEO other than removing the problems he identifies you'll go far towards getting a top 10 listing for your keywords. If you follow his best practices you'll have even more success.
But the first section isn't just natural search optimization. Andy also covers information on how to get the most from your money from pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns and how to convert visitors into customers with conversion rate optimization. There are also case studies for both natural search and PPC optimization to show you how other sites went about it.
Section 2: Web Performance Optimization
The second section moves into the optimization that most people think of - speed. But even in this section, this book is surprising. There is more to the book than just how to speed up your site's download time. One interesting thing I learned from this book was that people on high-speed connections are even less tolerant of slow sites than dial-up users (p. 147), being unwilling to wait more than 4 seconds for a page to load. Four seconds! That's not a lot of time. So speed is just as important as it ever was, if not more so.
The performance section covers the basics of website speed, including optimizing images/multimedia, minimizing requests, converting to CSS layout and more. But once the basics are covered, Andy goes into more performance tuning, helping you create a CSS site architecture, build Ajax applications that don't confuse customers and work more efficiently and quickly - just like Ajax intended, and then advance techniques to tune your website performance.
The last chapter is the proof. You don't have to believe any of what Andy wrote in the rest of the book, because in Chapter 10, he invites you to evaluate your results yourself. This chapter shows you how to use analytics tools to evaluate your optimization efforts and determine what is working and what isn't. That way, if something you try doesn't work for your site, you'll know, and you can change to something else.
Buy This Book - You Won't Be Sorry
All-in-all, this is a book for any Web developer who wants to take her site to the next level. And if you're a professional Web designer or developer (or want to become one), knowing the techniques in this book will help you get good jobs. Buy the book, you won't regret it.
