The Art of SEO (Theory in Practice), by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, Jessie Stricchiola
This is a newly published book about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which brings you state-of-the-art knowledge and
The Art of SEO (Theory in Practice) is written by four of the most noted experts in the field of search engine optimization (SEO). Here they provide you with proven guidelines and cutting-edge techniques for planning and executing a comprehensive SEO strategy.
There are many misconceptions and misunderstanding about SEO, and the authors know and tell a lot about those too, along with the fundamentals of good SEO. The book actually more or less gives you an education in SEO. It also addresses effectively working SEO tactics and provides you with a complete reference to SEO best practices. Some topics addressed in The Art of SEO are:
- Explore the underlying theory behind SEO and how search engines work
- Learn the steps you need to prepare for, execute, and evaluate SEO initiatives
- Examine a number of advanced strategies and tactics
- Understand the intricacies involved in managing complex SEO projects
- Learn what’s necessary to build a competent SEO team with defined roles
- Glimpse the future of search and what lies ahead for the SEO industry
Here is the chapter by chapter content of the book:
Ch 1: The Search Engines: Reflecting Consciousness and Connecting Commerce
Ch 2: Search Engine Basics
Ch 3: Determining Your SEO Objectives and Defining Your Site’s Audience
Ch 4: First Stages of SEO
Ch 5: Keyword Research
Ch 6: Developing an SEO-Friendly Website
Ch 7: Creating Link-Worthy Content and Link Marketing
Ch 8: Optimizing for Vertical Search
Ch 9: Tracking Results and Measuring Success
Ch 10: Domain Changes, Post-SEO Redesigns, and Troubleshooting
Ch 11: Honing the Craft: SEO Research and Study
Ch 12: Build an In-House SEO Team, Outsource It, or Both?
Ch 13: An Evolving Art Form: The Future of SEO
If you want to learn more about SEO, this is one of the best books for it. No major topic has been left out. SEO has so many components, and this book helps you see how they come together in bringing traffic to your site. A great investment!
, 
, and 
.Landing Page Optimization, by Tim Ash
Landing pages are pages designed specifically to make people land on your site – mostly from search results pages. But getting them there – creating a page with good SEO 
that makes your page and your site visible to the search engines is only half the job. Once they arrive, the page must also be good enough and interesting enough to make them want to stay a little, and perhaps even visit other pages on your site.
Tim Ash’s book teaches you some basic skills to achieve this. As a matter of fact, it is one of the better guides around that gives a step-by-step, comprehensive guide that imparets to you the skills necessary to improve your bottom line. And, for most of us, that’s something that matters a little, isn’t it?
So this neat guide teaches you to identify mission critical parts of your website and their true economic value, to define visitor classes and key conversion tasks, how to gain an understanding on customer decision-making, and other related tasks. It tells you about some common pitfalls – ones that I certainly have been unaware of – and how to awoid them. The book also includes a companion website and a detailed review of the Google Website Optimizer tool.
That’s a lot of crucially important information in a little package for people concerned about making visitors come, turnings visitors into customers, and improving the bottom line!
.Search Engine Optimization All-in-one Desk Reference for Dummies, by Bruce Clay and Susan Esparza
If you want your Web site to show up quickly when people search, Search Engine Optimization All–in–One For Dummies has the whole story on how to build a site
The book has chapters covering how search engines work, keyword strategy, competitive positioning, SEO Web design, content creation, linking, optimizing the foundations, analyzing results, international SEO, and search marketing. It even gives you some ok information about geeky things like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, so that you can improve you ability to match metatags and keywords to page content.
- How search engines work and which ones offer the best exposure
- How to develop a keyword strategy and be competitive
- Designing an SEO–friendly site
- How to line up relevant links for better search showing
- How to get more from your server and CMS
- How to measure your success
- How to globalize your success
- Using SEO to build your brand
A good alternative to this book, equally good, is Search Engine Optimization For Dummies
, amazon US
, amazon CA
, and Suchmaschinen-Optimierung für Dummies (Fur Dummies)
.Yahoo searches and blogs
One of the many signs of Google’s increasingly strong position as the number one search engine in the world, is witnessed in the lacking ability of Yahoo to make blog content searchable for its users.
I have just looked into the stats for my blogs. This is always interesting. But the single most interesting finding this time was that Google has delivered about 150 times as many hits to my blogs as Yahoo has. This difference is so large that it blows my mind. It really seems Google is running in circles around Yahoo as far as blog content is concerned!
I am unable to understand why. That is, I can see some explanations for it, but they only explain part of the difference, I think.
First off, I am using the XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin. This automatically notifies Google and Ask about updates on my blogs, and they are both quick to index the content. But in order to update Yahoo I need an application ID. And the links in the plugin takes me to the Yahoo developer Center. And since I’m not a developer, I don’t register there. And no other info is provided by Yahoo either. So I dropped it.
I have tried to find out how to automatically ping Yahoo, but I am unable to find it on their pages. And info I have found elsewhere, doesn’t work because Yahoo have move their pages with no info about where it is now to be found. This, to me, is arrogance.
Second, Yahoo don’t seem to read sitemaps well at all. Both on my sites and on my blogs they serve up old versions of pages to users.
So, to me, it seems Yahoo is losing the battle because they simply are not adapting to the changes in cyberspace fast enough, and because they are arrogant. They expect site owners to go through a lot of trouble to find out how to best use them. Instead, they should recognize that they probably need us more (as a collective) than we need them, and be a little more humble and flexible. As it is, I think they deserve to loose the search engine war against Goggle.
WordPress’ support of foreign languages not good enough
Overall, I am very satisfied with WordPress as a blogging platform. The platform itself is relatively strict and stiff, even awkward to use, but all the plugins, widgets and improvements from the user community makes it great.
However, my relationship to WordPress is not unproblematic. Our relationship is not one of peaceful coexistence. In some regards, I am very dissatisfied. I have written before about lacking quality control with templates and plugins that are downloadable even from WordPress’ own site. Templates where columns drop down, widgets don’t work properly, and so forth, translates into grief and dissatisfaction with WordPress itself. I suspect I am not alone in feeling this way when I lose time and get annoyed because something is not working properly.
Lack of proper support for foreign languages is probably the one thing about WordPress that annoys me the most. I have a Norwegian language blog. Here is what happens: I publish a new post entitled “Nye bøker våren 2008″ (translated: New books spring 2008). Now, when this is saved using the title as URL, WordPress saves it as “Nye bker vren 2008″. In other words, it drops the Norwegian characters “ø” and “å”.
This may seem like a small thing. But then there is Google. Google supports foreign characters. Thus, when somebody searches for “bøker våren 2008″, they will not find my post, because my post (as far as Google is concerned) is about “bker vren 2008″.
Now, this really is annoying. How would American or English bloggers feel if their “books reviews” got listed as “bk rviws” or something similar? For a guy that takes search engine optimization seriously, this is so bad I can hardly even begin to describe it!
I really don’t know where the problem lies – in the code for the WordPress platform, the widgets, the plugins, the templates, or PHP itself. I am not enough of a programmer to know. But I do know that if WordPress wants to capture a part of the growing blog market, something needs to be done. WordPress ought to commit to supporting foreign languages, as well as doing something rapidly with respect to quality control.
– Peter
Search Engine Optimization and the Title Tag
Here are two good resources on the proper use of title tags to drive traffic to a site:
The first article discusses both title and meta-tags:
http://www.searchbliss.com/seo-tools/search-engine-optimization.htm
The second article is more narrowly focused on titles:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/best-practices-for-title-tags
The articles are good introductions to this topic. However, the advice to include you company or site name in the title tag of your pages is a bit too strong. My thinking is that usually it is best not to include it – simply because it is a waste of very valuable space! I would say that the ony exception to this rule is where you are willing to invest a lot – including your valuable title space – in building a brand name. For most purposes, say for blogs and most web sites that do not sell branded products, I would, as a rule, say that the name should not be in the title. For these types of sites, it is usually sufficient to display the name of the blog or site prominently on each page.
– Peter
SEO and proper use of titles and meta tags
One way to learn about search engine optimization (SEO) is to learn from successful sites. I have found an example of good use of the HTML “title” and “meta”-tags.
If you search using Google, with the keywords “books” and “reviews”, you will find that the number one spot is occupied by http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/ . Why this site, you may ask, and not, for instance, New York Times Book Review, or Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or some other large corporation.
Well, there may be several answers. However, one part of the answer is good use of title and meta-tags. Look at this:
meta name="description" content="Links to free and publicly available professional reviews of recently released books"
meta name="keywords" content="book reviews, reviews of books, book review site, professional book review, fiction, nonfiction"
title>Reviews of Books - Book Reviews
So part of what is happening is that the site uses title and meta tags very, very efficiently! They have chosen an extremely narrow range of keywords, and optimized for just two words – namely “books” and “reviews”.
Now, when I said “part of what is happening”, I did it because another reason they score so well is that the site also is frequently linked to – checking with Google I found 1710 links to the site (please note that this is a relatively low number for a site ranking at the number one spot – the New York Times Book Review, which is ranked number two on the same search, by comparison has 10500 links to their site).
So, what’s the lesson: Decide what to optimize on for a given page, and use title and meta tags efficiently!
Search Engine Optimization on Web Sites
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) in my experience is 5% smartness, 95% work. Being smart involves having a strategy, basically a goal and a set of principles or rules about how to best achieve the goal. I try to implement the least time consuming and most important rules first, and then to do the more demanding tasks later. Regardless of all the books written on the subject and all the advertisements by consultants claiming to have more or less scientific knowledge about SEO, I do not view SEO as a science. Search engines are based on science, but SEO is mostly art. The reaon, of course, is that the search engines don’t want us (or their competitors) to know exactly what they are doing. Therefore, there is far too much uncertainty and far too many unpredictable elements involved for anyone to know anything with much certainty when it comes to SEO.
Consequently, I think, I examine, I formulate rules, and I implement them, and I study the results. Then I try to learn from my mistakes and build on what seems to work. So far, from what I can see using my site statistics, is that using page titles with the most important keywords in them works well. The same is the case for the use of semantic URLs – that is, URLs for my web pages that use natural language and contain keywords. For example, a page saved as www.mydomain.com/bk1xxx1222.htm does not get as many hits as one called www.mydomain.com/nokia9920.htm
So for the moment I am spending at least an hour, sometimes 2 hours, each day implementing these simple rules on my web sites. And it does help. Over the last month or so, I have observed considerable increases in the number of hits, both from Google and other search engines, on the pages that I have worked with. But it takes time to do the work, and it takes time before I begin to see the results as well.
– Peter
Search Engine Optimization – Posting Length
Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a lot of work. But a number of easy steps can take you a long way towards search engine visibility and drive a lot of traffic to your blog. Writing postings with an optimal length is one of these.
While there is a lot of speculation among people discussing search engine optimization that maybe postings that are too short are passed over by the search engines, there is no hard evidence of this. But there is, on the other hand, research that shows that longer articles have a steep drop off rate in readers after the text gets below the end of the first screen.
Also, there is considerable evidence that frequent posting affects ranking positively. And it is pretty easy to figure out that with short postings you will be better able to direct a reader to exactly that one little piece of information that will solve her problem through your keywords. Furthermore, longer posts also make it difficult to keep keyword density up. These insights imply that postings should be short, to the point, and frequent, rather than long and trying to make several points simultaneously.
There is no science as to what the ideal length is. The ideal length to me is somewhere in the region of 200 to 300 words. That means my postings can have substance – the “meat” readers want – while still being focused and tight. I may write shorter or longer, but overall that is my target length!
Search Engine Optimization in WordPress: Use a Semantic Permalink Structure
I have written previously, in the post Search Engine Optimization Starts with the Titles, about the important role your titles play in making your blog more easy to find for the search engines. In that post, I also said that good titles were even more important if you also changed the way your posts were saved, so that the URLs of your postings reflected the titles.
Now, I don’t know how to do that with all the various types of blogging software around, but here is how you can achieve this if you are using a WordPress blog (I found this advice on Chris Pearson’s site, so the credit for finding this out is his):
- In your WordPress dashboard, visit the Options tab.
- Next, select Permalinks from the sub-navigation menu.
- Under the “Common options” heading, you should see four buttons that correspond with the four available permalink structures for WordPress. Select Custom (the last one), and enter
/%postname%/in the text input field.- Click on one of the two Update Permalink Structure » buttons, and you’re done!
Oh, and I suppose I took it for granted, but it’s certainly worth noting that using a semantic permalink structure on your site (as I’ve suggested here) is extremely beneficial to your overall search engine optimization. It’s literally something that everyone with a WordPress site should do.
So, that’s how it’s done. Among the tasks involved in search engine optimization (SEO), this is definitely one of the easier one. Nevertheless, as Chris Pearson says, it is also one which is highly important and is extremely beneficial.
– Peter
Nordic bookblog- Ashes to Dust, by Yrsa Sigurdardottir
- Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End, by Leif GW Persson
- Bestsellers in Sweden, August 2010
- Scandinavian movies: Five memorable dramas
- Bloodthirsty femmes: The Women of Scandinavian Crime Fiction
- Red Wolf, by Liza Marklund
- Yours Until Death, by Gunnar Staalesen
- Jussi Adler-Olsen wins the Glass Key Award for 2010
- Italian Shoes, by Henning Mankell
- Bad Intentions, by Karin Fossum – an Inspector Konrad Sejer novel
- Nekkidblogger CSS & SEO
- A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization, by Deltina Hay
- Internet marketing and the old style marketers
- HTML & CSS: The Complete Reference, Fifth Edition, by Thomas A. Powell
- HTML, XHTML, and CSS Bible (Fifth edition), by Steven M. Schafer
- CSS3 – fun with rotation
- Box with rounded corners and shadows – fun with CSS3
- Opera 10.5 – faster, better CSS3 support
- Beginning CSS Web Development: From Novice to Professional, by Simon Collison
- CSS Web Site Design, by Eric A. Meyer
- The Ultimate CSS Reference, by Tommy Olssen and Paul O’Brien