Customer Reviews

SEO Made Simple (Second Edition): Strategies For Dominating The World's Largest Search Engine

5 star:		(107)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I think it's time that someone gives this book something other than a five star review which, in my opinion, it doesn't merit. Toward that end, here's my take:

Judging from the content of the many laudatory reviews, this book's primary audience is among people who are amateurs or noobies in the field of website design and functionality. If your experience in designing a webpage is limited to a WYSIWYG editor, if you don't understand XHTML, you're not sure what tag, element, attribute or "meta" mean, then this book is probably appropriate to your level of knowledge.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with being inexperienced. Everybody has to start at the beginning. However, if you are an experienced website designer who, hopefully, hand-codes your pages in XHTML and CSS, makes an effort to comply with current standards for the separation of structure and presentation, and are making more than a formal bow to the need for accessibility, then there is likely to be little of interest to you in this book.

To be fair, there are certainly many good pieces of advice here, despite the author using the first 20% of the ~100 pages to toot his own horn. However, there is little information that could not be found by spending a couple of hours searching the internet for SEO topics; i.e., almost all of what the author "reveals" is rather common knowledge. Again, in the interest of fairness, the author readily admits that he is not a code expert. As a result, there are very few useful examples of actual HTML markup code. The snippets that do exist would be old news to a real developer but, occurring without the context of a real document, would be of little use to a novice designer.The glossary at the end of the book, which takes up about 10% of an already suspiciously short volume, is the last place I would turn for a cogent definition of many of the terms he includes; e.g., "Cascading style sheets (CSS) - used to manipulate and easily manage the design of a website." Hmmm...perhaps that definition could be improved and expanded a bit for the next edition.

As an ex-professional printer (many years ago), I was disappointed with the design and typography of this book. Besides coming across with too much similarity to the "Get Rich Quick with Real Estate Foreclosures" and "Dr. X's New Wonder Diet" genre, the book is poorly edited (too many typos) and composed in a sans-serif typeface (alright, I admit to being biased against that), making it difficult to read for long lengths of time. Also, many of the screen capture illustrations are so small that I needed a magnifying class to read them. I applaud the quite-readable choice of a large point-size for the body type, but that also helps pad out to about 100 sparse pages what should have probably been nothing more than a pamphlet half that size.

To his credit, the author seems to have adhered to the pre-eminent rule of the medical profession: "First of all, DO NO HARM!" His advice is all good, if not exhaustive, and there is certainly something here for any newcomer to website functionality. He also does a good job of steering the reader away from the "black hat" techniques that may have been effective in the not too distant past. Kudos to him for that. But, in contrast to the many other reviews declaring this book as the be-all and end-all of SEO advice, I beg to differ. There are other books on the subject as good, or better, than this one. Given the short length, the sub-standard physical design and production, the pretty well known nature of most of the advice given, I suggest it is over-priced; a price more like $7.95 would come closer to the real value of this tome.

However, if you are a noobie who is being pressured by some self-proclaimed SEO expert, who is promising to get you on Google's first page for the mere sum of $695, then buying and reading this book at its current price may very well be a real money-saving bargain! Bottom-line: it's not a BAD book; it's just not that GOOD! Caveat emptor!

This book is very practical. It tells you exactly what to do. I'm not a pro but I'm not a novice either and I have found this book a perfect guide that serves as a reference book for me to refer back to as I build more sites. It's straight forward and the author makes it clear that SEO is not hard but it does take work, there is no lazy way to do it, you have to put in the work both on your site and off site. I give it 5 stars as its delivers what it promises.

I can't recommend this book enough. As promised, it specifically outlines the steps needed to improve your PageRank. I heard of this book through a friend and his results are unbelievable.

I have been assisting clients with web marketing for a number of years now. I bought SEO Made Simple because even as a professional you never stop learning and as I am committed to my continuing education as an SEO professional I was extremely pleased after I read SEO Made Simple. Any SEO pro who wants to learn more as a means of providing additional value to their clients MUST read this book ASAP. It is very well written, concise and to the point. The book can easily be read in one sitting as the author didn't fill the book with a bunch of unusable information; he gets straight to the point on everything you need to get your sites ranked fast. You get everything you need and nothing you don't here. The author also wrote the book from a perspective of all learning levels. If you just want to crack the code on how to get sites ranked on the search engines or are a seasoned SEO expert, you will find many points of value in this book.

As soon as you start reading from the very first page, you know you are in for a real treat and are going to come away "smarter" in the SEO businessSEO Made Simple: Strategies For Dominating The World's Largest Search Engine (Volume 1). If you need a competitive advantage on the real SEO secrets and what the search engines are really looking for, it is revealed in these pages. It should be a staple on any SEO person's library.

I highly recommend it and look forward to reading it again to gain additional insights.

Okay, where do I start??????

The author offers a 'secret' help page for all readers who bought his book... When you reach it online, he will ask you to write a 'honest review' of your book on amazon.com and in exchange "SEO training videos absolutely FREE! valued at $297" for anyone who writes an 'honest review' of this book on Amazon.com...

However, to get the free SEO VIDEOS, the reader must write the review and then submit the whole review via email to him (the author)... In order to qualify for the SEO videos absolutely FREE!

So if I write a honest, not positive review will I be waiting forever for my video??? And If I write a GOOD POSITIVE 'honest' review I can be sure to get my videos?? (I guess I will find out)

I though about it and decided that $297 is not enough to make me give a good review for a book that does not deserve it.

My advice? I suspect the 107 positive reviews this book got where influenced by the fact that the readers did want to 'qualify' for the free SEO videos.

However, the book is OK... the writer could have made an effort to guide us towards good FREE SEO tools on line as opposed to giving us links to his overpriced affiliate partners...

But, there is A LOT OF SNAKE OIL in the internet marketing scene and this book is not the worst, it is actually helpful for beginners. Just don't follow his "free secret page links for readers on line" and don't just give him a 5 star review in exchange for a few free SEO Videos that you can download on youtube anyway.

A lot of the links the author refer to are outdated and lead to nowhere.

For example, his link to wordtracker link at the forums link to this:

[...]

Moreover, I was happy with this book until I started to find his online references.

I'll explain:

1) 'Commercial intention' apparently does not exists anymore, for a few years now as I found out...
So when the author wrote the second edition of this book in 2011 he forgot to mention this...

The only reason why I am upset about this is because I actually spent a whole hour of my valuable time trying to find it....

The piece of information that this service is no longer available should not have escaped the second edition, particularly when the author says that that is the most important step of choosing the right keyword and that choosing the right keyword by its turn is the most important step of the whole SEO project.

2) Your online references at [...] - Most links lead to sales copies of people trying to flog their stuff... and you say that page was designed to help us... hummm not sure about that, sorry!

3)Where the help links don't take us to sale copies, they take us to long 'fill in all your details' pages that lead no where.. example: Free SEO Tools - Social Bookmarking Service - I pray to god that I don't get spam out of my brains after filing in my details in those pages.

Please God don't let them sell my information on world wide marketing lists!!!

I have had a chance to read all of Michael's books on SEO and have yet to be disappointed. This one is no exception. Michael clearly outlines the steps needed to search engine optimize your website. I have recommended this book to many of my friends and business contacts who are interested in learning about SEO. If you are a small business owner or a blogger and would like to get more traffic your site, this is the book you need.

This book was just long enough to convey the necessary information to begin optimization. This book was very helpful for people of all SEO experience.

I really enjoyed "SEO Made Simple". Since I am sure you are a busy webmaster just like me, I will make a bulleted list that expresses why I think this is a great book to save you time!

1. Unlike many other SEO books, this book contains actual step by step guides that will help you improve your search rankings.

2. In addition to just the material contained in the book, the author has a website that provides additional materials, updates and guides free of charge.

3. Lots of SEO guides advocate techniques that provide for short term gain....this book teaches how to achieve real rankings dominance with high quality material.

I thought this book was really helpful learning what SEO is all about and how to get my local business on Google's front page. It has a good amount of detail and provides a lot of helpful strategies to your website's rankings increased. My traffic has really shot up since I started using the techniques taught in this book.

"SEO Made Simple (second edition): Strategies For Dominating The World's Largest Search Engine" was exactly what I was looking for, a detailed view of the best practices in SEO. Most newbie SEOs know, there a lot of this stuff can be freely found all over the web. Not having a single, organized all one one place however, SEO makes it incredibly annoying when you want to learn a new tactic or get a better understanding of particular strategy. This is a fantastic reference guide for doing it right and understanding the various tactics. I definitely recommend it!