Product Description

You don't have to have the biggest name or the most dazzling graphics to lure customers to your Web site. These days, all you really need is prominent search-engine placement. This book shows you how to get it! With searching one of the most popular Internet activities, a top spot on a major search engine virtually ensures a high volume of visitors--though converting them to buyers is another story. In these pages, top Internet marketer and strategist Catherine Seda tackles both parts of that equation. First, she outlines the strategy involved in buying the specific keyword positions that will lead users directly to the page you want. Then, she describes how you can turn poor-performing ad copy into targeted sales-getters, and how you can evaluate and correct low visitor-to-buyer conversions. Beginning marketers will find the info they need to implement a Web strategy quickly, while advanced marketers will find all kinds of tips for analyzing and improving current results.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #188136 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

About the Author

Catherine Seda is a popular speaker on the topics of search engine marketing, affiliate management, and low-cost web site promotion. She's known for sharing practical tips and tools in her dynamic sessions at leading search engine, marketing, and industry association conferences.

Since 1995, Catherine has worked with organizations in the U.S. and Europe to leverage the Internet as a marketing tool. As the marketing executive of a web agency for five years, she championed client online promotions that included search engine optimization, pay-per-click media buys, opt-in email, banner advertising, link popularity campaigns, custom sweepstakes, and ROI tracking. She also designed the search engine program, which included co-creating an affiliate trademark protection strategy, for a direct response TV agency's clients.

Through her agency, Seda Communication, Catherine offers open workshops and onsite training for search engine marketing. Additionally, she leads a team of search engine specialists in managing corporate client campaigns.

Catherine shares revenue-generating techniques in her articles as a regular columnist for Entrepreneur magazine, editor of the Search Engine Sales e-zine, and freelance writer for industry publications including Response magazine, SearchDay (Search Engine Watch), LookSmart, Pay Per Click Analyst, FindWhat.com, and others. She's also a contributing author of Search Engine Positioning.

Catherine believes in a "test before you invest" Internet marketing strategy for immediate and long-term success.

Customer Reviews

Direct and Authoritative
The SEO proces can seem daunting and Ms Seda recognizes that fact. She gives a methodical, if not also logical trail to follow and has obviously done laborious research; which pays off. It may appear technical and dry, but the details are necessary to convey the ins and outs of SEO. Bravo and it will remain a part of my business reference library.

It's a Good Read for the Money
It's not a bad overview of Search Engine Marketing, but I wouldn't recommend stopping with this read.

Some of the things Catherine covers are good and don't change. As an example, the chapters that provide Copyrighting Tips and that talk about how to improve conversions on Landing Pages. Even though they are only providing a glimpse as to what you need to know, many of those things do not change from year to year.

Other things however are going to require the reader further study. What one needs to focus on today to get good rankings is quite different from the day this book was written.

An example is paid inclusion; someone reading this should know that you don't need to pay to get indexed now. Sitemaps, getting backlinks from ranked sites that get regularly crawled, directories, blogs etc..

But it's good to absorb whatever one can. Even if someone comes away with a few ideas they didn't have before to improve their bottom line, it's worth the small price of this book.

Outdated, outdated, outdated
I'm sure this book was cutting edge when it was first published in February of 2004, but now it's for the most part outdated. For the absolute beginner to this area, there are some good general points, but references to long-since defunct or consolidated web companies (Urchin, Inktomi,etc) make it difficult to understand just what's still relevant. Google and Yahoo (and soon Microsoft) are defining the new landscape of this field as we speak...Try the new book from IBM press, "Search Engine Marketing"....chock full of the latest (as late as can be in this field) info.