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
This review is from: SEO Warrior (Paperback)
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.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Immensely valuable despite the PHP, January 19, 2011
This review is from: SEO Warrior (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
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