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.