SEO Warrior [Paperback]

John I Jerkovic (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 20, 2009 | ISBN-10: 059615707X | ISBN-13: 978-0596157074 | Edition: 1

How can you make it easier for people to find your website? And how can you convert casual visitors into active users? SEO Warrior shows you how it's done through a collection of tried and true techniques, hacks, and best practices. Learn the nuts and bolts of search engine optimization (SEO) theory, the importance of keyword strategy, and how to avoid and remedy search engine traps.

You'll also learn about search engine marketing (SEM) practices, such as Google AdWords, and how you can use social networking to increase your visibility. Ideal for web developers, savvy marketers, webmasters, and anyone else interested in SEO, this book serves not only as an SEO tutorial, but also as a reference for implementing effective SEO techniques.

• Create compelling sites with SEO that can stand the test of time
• Optimize your site for Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft's Bing, as well as search engines used in different parts of the world
• Conduct keyword research to find the best terms to reach your audience--and the related terms they'll respond to
• Learn what makes search engines tick by utilizing custom scripts
• Analyze your site to see how it measures up to the competition

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

John I. Jerkovic currently manages a group of IT professionals at a wealth management company. His team works closely with the marketing (e-Business) team in managing close to 100 internal and external sites. A part of this work includes SEO. He's also had the opportunity to architect (and work with) several enterprise search solutions based on the Google Search appliance (GSE), IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition and Lucene. In 2009, John won two Web Marketing Association awards for outstanding achievement in website development. He maintains an SEO blog at http://www.seowarrior.net/.

Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (November 20, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 059615707X
• ISBN-13: 978-0596157074
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #574,835 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #82 in Books > Computers & Technology > Internet & Web Culture > Search Engine Optimization

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book for Webmasters, Which Teaches You Everything About SEO January 15, 2010

By Randall Degges VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I just finished reading SEO Warrior today. I'm a professional developer (mostly systems engineering in C, python, and java), but I dabble in best-practices web design on my spare time for fun. I picked up a copy of this book as I've heard a lot about "SEO" in the industry, but wasn't sure whether or not it was something real, or just a buzz word.

The author of this book, John I. Jerkovic does an excellent job not only detailing exactly how SEO works, but also why it works, what is good, and what is bad. The book starts out by proving certain SEO elements are legitimate, by using some perl program to perform a large amount of searches for popular keywords, then compare HTML elements of the top ranked sites to see what they have in common (keyword density, title element, meta tags, etc.) In my opinion, this alone was worth the money, as it clearly shows by real-world example, that SEO does work, and proves what elements are more important than others.

The material covered is very thorough (and at times, a bit too wordy), and will leave you with no questions unanswered. The author covers:

- tools to help you test your websites for SEO
- how to use google, yahoo, and bing searches to look for competitors
- how to use google, yahoo, and bing optimizations elements in your HTML pages to promote "organic SEO"
- how to avoid search engine spam
- how the nofollow attribute works
- how to create a sitemap
- how to write a robots.txt file
- where to look for relevant information on SEO
- how to use advertising to your advantage
- how to get money by showing ads on your website
- how to find and detect blackhat SEO
- how to use social media sites (twitter, facebook, etc.) to establish your brand

and a good deal of other topic.

The book is a bit thick, coming in at around 400 pages of content, but has quite a few diagrams illustrating google, yahoo, and bing webmaster tools (among other things), which take up ~5 -> 10% of the total pages. It is a very easy read, not very heavy on coding, but also not too high level.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who does web design themselves, and is interested in making their pages popular, but doesn't really know anything about SEO. The book teaches you everything you'll need to know, and takes you from nothing to everything in a few days.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Immensely valuable despite the PHP January 19, 2011

By Alexander Kine

Format:Paperback

John Jerkovic's SEO Warrior is immensely valuable, albeit burdened with too much do-it-yourself PHP code. Free toolbars from SEObook, SEOmoz and Chris Pederick implement many of the same features described in the PHP examples. Regardless, his explanation of external ranking factors opens most websites to new levels of optimization and success.

Strong chapters:
* The big picture,
* Internal ranking factors,
* External ranking factors,
* Search engine traps,
* Keyword research (excellent worksheets),
* Competitor research and analysis,
* Content considerations,
* Search engine spam.

Weak chapters:
* Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics,
* Social networking phenomenon,
* Search engine marketing.

Score:
4 stars: Overall
5 stars: Benefits and outcomes can be immediate
5 stars: New information, especially external ranking factors
1 star: Too much do-it-yourself PHP code

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent SEO book April 13, 2010

By Jonny Frank

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Excellent overview of SEO. The author touches on all areas related to SEO, not always in great detail which is understandable as some topics could warrant their own book but he covers enough of each to give you a thorough understanding. Please be advised that all the code script examples are opensource based, php primarily. If you are a ASP.NET, C# app builder they won't help you that much but the general idea is communicated through the examples which you can figure out in your language of choice. A must book for your SEO collection.