Product Description

Influence search engine results and bring targeted traffic to your Web site with an hour a day of search engine optimization (SEO). Drawing on years of experience as successful SEO consultants, Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin provide detailed, practical, and often surprisingly simple techniques for improving results. Their simple strategies include setting SEO goals, site optimization, developing and implementing a strategy that might include both free and paid efforts, and tools for monitoring trends, measuring the competition, and tracking results.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #41462 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-13
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Review
New to the sometimes confusing and seemingly arcane world of making search engine friendly web sites? A new book offers a systematic, common-sense approach to the art and science of SEO.
Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin is written for anyone who has a web site and has yet to embark on the time-consuming process of optimizing the site for search engines. Both authors are experienced SEOs, and the book reflects the systematic approach they've developed whenever working with a new client.
Refreshingly, this approach focuses not only on technical tactics, but also on the reasons why SEO is important beyond just achieving high rankings in search engine results—things like business goals, creating appealing marketing messages and designing human-usable web sites.
The book also avoids SEO techniques du jour, the kinds of tactics that are hotly debated in forums and that may or may not have any effect on your overall success. Rather, the book focuses on a solid, fundamental approach using time-tested techniques that work regardless of seemingly arbitrary algorithmic changes by the search engines.
The book is also very well written, using SEO-specific jargon only when necessary and always making sure to introduce new terms in clear English (there's also an excellent glossary at the end of the book).
The first part of the book focuses on an area many newcomers totally neglect, often to their detriment: laying an effective foundation for your SEO efforts. You need to clarify your goals and really have an understanding of the fundamentals of how search engines work and what types of SEO activities do (and don't) work before plunging in to your work.
And for anyone that works in an organization, the next key step is to create a strategy that works with your existing marketing, information technology, sales and other groups to make sure your SEO efforts support the overall goals of the entire team. Part two of the book focuses on developing this strategy, and also offers suggestions on working with other groups and selling them on the importance of effective SEO.
Only when this important groundwork has been established should you begin the actual work of keyword selection and optimization, link building and so on.
That's the focus of part three—developing and implementing a comprehensive SEO plan for your web site. This section takes a common-sense approach breaking the search engine optimization efforts for your web site into a 12-week process, and as the subtitle implies, dedicating an hour a day during this period to a specific goal-based task.
The authors provide useful tools for managing this process, in the form of spreadsheet-based worksheets to help you plan and organize your various tasks. Again, the emphasis is on providing simple but effective tools that someone new to the process can use. That said, these worksheets are truly useful, and you may find them becoming integral parts of your overall SEO toolkit.
Throughout the book the authors offer useful tips as asides. "Pearls of wisdom" tips are obviously tactics gleaned from experience, while "slacker" tips are great for letting you know when you can get away with less work or when you shouldn't obsess over a certain activity.
There are also longer case studies and expert opinions from other well-known SEOs such as Aaron Wall and Patricia Fusco scattered throughout the book.
In all, Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day is an excellent overview of SEO and provides solid advice and guidance for anyone just getting started. The book is also useful if you've done SEO in the past but haven't kept up with the current state of search engines and the kinds of SEO techniques that work today (and want to know what to avoid to stay out of trouble). (SearchEngineWatch.com, July 6th, 2006)

"With straightforward candor, the authors remind everyone SEO isn't brain surgery. A well-rounded, left- and right-brain approach to successful SEO."
—P.J. Fusco (ClickZ Network, www.clickz.com)

From the Back Cover
Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website

A Step-by-Step Guide

As bracing as a shot of espresso, Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day offers brisk advice, bite-sized tasks, and straightforward tools to help you significantly increase visibility for your website on all the major search engines.

In this ultimate do-it-yourself guide, SEO consultants and authors Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin offer many surprisingly simple techniques and insights, including how to:

• Cut through the trendy jargon to find the Eternal Truths of SEO
• Understand SEO essentials like choosing the best keywords and optimizing meta tags
• Steer clear of common SEO mistakes
• Optimize your website for factors search engines care about—and skip the ones they don't
• Take the plunge with pay-per-click campaigns, link-building methods, and more
• Track and measure results with spreadsheets, customizable reports, and other valuable tools

You'll also find:

• Essential hints, tips, and techniques for everyone from one-person shops to Fortune 500 companies
• Pearls of Wisdom, such as "You will never really know exactly how Google works"
• Real-world From the Trenches case studies that illustrate successes to learn from and mistakes to avoid

About the Author
Jennifer Grappone is a Los Angeles–based search marketing consultant whose work has resulted in many targeted hits and happy clients in various industries including media, entertainment, software, and non-profit. Starting out as a writer/producer/director of industrial and corporate videos, Jennifer followed the dot-com boom and became a project manager for large-scale web development projects before working exclusively in SEO in 2000. Jennifer advocates a holistic approach to SEO, one that combines elements of good writing, usability, search-friendly site design, and link building. You can often find Jennifer hunched over a laptop in any number of wireless cafes in Northeast LA. Stop by and say hello!

Gradiva Couzin has been working in search marketing since its early days in 1998. Since then, she has improved the search presence of organizations ranging from small businesses working on a shoestring to Fortune 500 companies. Her SEO strategy creates win-win solutions by improving the match between searchers and websites. With a history as a civil engineer and experience in website and database development, Gradiva enjoys the technical side of SEO and loves to facilitate communication between techie and non-techie types. She is also an accomplished artist, painting oil portraits on commission. Gradiva lives and works in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights with her husband and two small children.

Customer Reviews

For me those tips worked well
There is a lot of proud guys entered the 1 star to this book - DO NOT be mis leaded please, when you are choosing a SEO book. Right on, there is probably a lot of water inside, and I also do not like the spreadsheets what authors are suggesting to download and fill all the way - but hey - the information what they suggest enter on them - are useful, and worked for me. I started use the tips they suggest in July 2007, and back then according Google analytics the % of organic google search was 0.5 %. Now, it came up to 18 % (most are PPC still), and guess what - I never used another book for this, and all other books I read till now, or numerous suggestions in blogs and forums, well they actually are same, maybe small details missed.
I highly recommend this book. My personal example shows - generally the methonds they offer works.

Some good, some just average information
I am torn on this book because I liked the first few chapters and found them simple to read and incorporate the ideas. I liked the theory of the "right brain + left brain" approach. I'm not new to SEO so I was able to move quickly through the work. The templates were helpful -- at first. But soon I found them cumbersome and not always worth the time I spent to put them together - especially when it came to key word selection. The industry is changing so fast the URLs were not always accurate anymore. The Wordtracker product they highly recommend i thought was a waste of my time - but it could just be the industry i'm in. So try this book if you are new to SEO - it won't hurt and may help.

Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day
This books gets right to the heart of what all website owners want to know. How do I attract viewers to my sight. There are many practices that should be followed that the author suggests. Not a fluff book. Practical advice is given.