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: #54536 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-13
• Original language: English
• 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

A Bite Sized Guide To SEO
I've recently launched a B2C website and I know enough to know that it's no longer the case that you "build it and they will come". But I didn't realise getting my website to be seen by enough people to make it financially viable would be quite this difficult!

Like many new businesses I have a limited budget so I wanted to see if I could tackle some of the SEO work myself or if I had to pay for someone to do it for me, I wanted to have some knowledge before I hired someone.

This book breaks up the multiple and often lengthy tasks required to tackle SEO. It makes technical terms easy to understand which helps if you're not a technical person like me. And it allows you to do a bit of SEO work at a time meaning if you are even a little bit disciplined, you can fit some SEO work into your busy day.

Other SEO books I've read can make the task sound so daunting you don't know where to start so you don't. By breaking up tasks into bite sized chunks, this book motivated me to start my SEO work. Bring on the results!

A truly great book!
Search Engine Optimization is a complicated process made so by the fact that Google, the number one search engine, has successfully kept its algorithms a deep, dark secret and continues to do so.

The book is divided into three parts: 1) Foundation, 2) Strategy and 3) Your SEO Plan. Foundation stresses the need to thoroughly understand what you want your website to do for you. Some people want to promote their businesses; but a surprising number just want to provide reliable information or publicize a provocative blog. Once you know what you want, you can start thinking about how to tailor your approach to SEO to meet those goals. Several downloadable worksheets are referred to, and the explanations on how to use them and how they are interrelated are clear and logical.

Many who read this book will be optimizing their own websites; but for those who are fortunate enough to have colleagues on whom they can draw, a number of suggestions for how to obtain their willing assistance are offered. There also is a 50-page chapter devoted to a four week plan on how to get ready to implement your SEO Plan.

The Plan itself covers three months and includes a systematic method for accomplishing the most important optimization tasks in the first instance, and then establishing the habit of checking them regularly thereafter.

At the rate of one hour per day, the average reader should be able to implement the entire program in four months, which is the intent of the book. Those who are more experienced at SEO may be able to complete the program in less time. Four months may seem like a long time, but as I said at the beginning, it is complicated. There is much to remember; and because the Internet doesn't stand still, neither can the SEO process. Although there were a couple of URLs that no longer worked, the authors responded promptly to my e-mail asking for their assistance after I pointed this out to them.

On a final note, I need to say that I couldn't disagree more with the reviewer who thought the book was "poorly organized." Quite to the contrary, it is well organized and well-thought out. I warmly commend it to all who want to increase their Web presence.

Bruce Hoag, PhD
Co-author Managing Value-based Organizations: It's Not What You Think (New Horizons in Management Series)
http://www.p-advantage.com

Paced learning program has benefits and issues
The book is well written and easy to read but having said that I find that the downloadable workbooks (of which there are a number) are of little value and far too basic.

I also would have liked the book written in 2 sections - Got on with it and Go through the Lessons whereas the book is simply 'Go through the Lessons' without a sensible way to read through and garner useful info.

The paced structure is, I find, limiting rather than enlightening.

Mind you for people who learn differently to me this book could be a veritable goldmine of information and could lead then toweards being very competent SEOers.