Customer Reviews

Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site

5 star:		(37)
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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
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With the ever-increasing attention paid to the search engine space, it pays to know how best to design your web site and plan your marketing campaigns to optimize this resource. A recent book I received fills that space nicely... Search Engine Marking, Inc. - Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Web Site by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt.

Content:
Part 1 - The Basics of Search Marketing: Why Search Marketing Is Important... And Difficult; How Search Engines Work; How Search Marketing Works; How Searchers Work
Part 2 - Develop Your Search Marketing Program: Identify Your Web Site's Goals; Measure Your Web Site's Success; Measure Your Search Marketing Success; Define Your Search Marketing Strategy; Sell Your Search Marketing Proposal
Part 3 - Execute Your Search Marketing Program: Get Your Site Indexed; Choose Your Target Keywords; Optimize Your Content; Attract Links To Your Site; Optimize Your Paid Search Program; Make Search Marketing Operational; What's Next?
Glossary; Index

First off, this book is really well done. Using a writing style that's more conversational and readable than I expected from the cover, they go into solid detail about everything related to search engines. This includes how they work, what people are looking for when they search, and how best to understand the types of visitors you'll get in order to turn them into potential customers. They also spend plenty of time telling you what to avoid in the way of spammy and sleazy tricks to get better rankings (which will probably also get you banned from the engines). As a result, you can read the information with confidence that you're being useful and ethical information related to improving your visibility on the web.

While most any size business could benefit from this information, I kept thinking of larger organizations during my reading. Marketing Communication (MarCom) departments, at least those who understand the web, absolutely need to know this information and formalize their organizational approach to search engine optimization. A single person business looking to advertise on the web, especially if this is their first foray into the cyberworld, might find themselves a bit overwhelmed by over 500 pages of information. Conversely, a MarCom department would have the time and resources to commit to a focused and planned approach to their search engine results. Both businesses would benefit, but I think the larger companies would benefit more...

Regardless of your organizational size and structure, it's worth the read. You'll come away with a much more complete understanding of how you need to position yourself to get noticed in the increasingly crowded world of search...

Search engine marketing is one of the most important parts of Internet marketing and also one of the most frustrating and difficult. While there are lots of people and businesses that are glad to tell you the secrets of how to get into one of the top positions on a search engine most of them are old techniques that don't work any more. In this book the authors examine the details of how a search engine really works and basic search marketing methods. One of the most interesting parts of the book is a section on understanding how a person thinks when they are issuing a search query. There is also a great graphic on the relationships between many of the search engines.

The process they outline is simple yet very powerful if followed. First you have to identify the goals of your web site. If you don't know what you are trying to accomplish then you are unlikely to accomplish it. Then you determine how to measure the success of your website. After this you develop a search marketing strategy and how you are going to measure the success of your marketing efforts. If you are in a larger company the authors even include a section on selling your search marketing proposal to your company.

The book includes a lot of the necessary details to implement your plan. This includes how to get your site indexed, choosing your target words, and attracting links to your site. This is some of the best, most detailed information that I have seen anywhere on this subject and shows that the authors are up to date in their understanding of how search engines work and how to get top rankings. Search Engine Marketing, Inc. is highly recommended to anyone trying to market their website.

I have just finished reading the book Search Engine Marketing Inc. from IBM Press and have to say it was one of those page-turners that I just couldn't put down.

Mike Moran and Bill Hunt walk you through a well-grounded methodology in approaching SEM (search engine marketing). They begin with an up-to-date introduction to the fundamentals: of how search engines have evolved, how search marketing works, and how searchers and site visitors really think when they're trying to find information. Then they walk you through every facet of creating an effective program: projecting business value, selling stakeholders and executives, building teams, choosing strategy, implementing metrics, and above all, execution. The authors systematically address every issue you're likely to encounter, from enforcing search-engine friendly content standards through hiring consultants.

There are no black-hat or grey-hat tricks here. In fact, the book throughout points out the easy traps you might be tempted to fall into and explains why you should steer clear.

I whole-heartedly recommend this read.

I have to admit that this was a very difficult book for me to read, not because it isn't an absolutely great resource or an all-inclusive textbook fore building a search engine marketing campaign from the ground up within your organization, but precisely because it was exactly those things. Because I have the attention span of a gnat, reading anything that doesn't have a plot is hard for me (some of the most recent John Grisham books are the exception... that guy can make a phone book interesting!).

SEM, Inc is a very dense 500 pages, written out in a small 10 point font. Don't pick this up looking for some light SEM fluff reading or some easy quick tips. SEM, Inc takes you all the way through the search engine marketing process from start to finish, leaving nothing out. Written more for larger corporations than the mom and pop small business, the information is solid and actionable for businesses of all types, shapes and sizes. Everything from how to get a campaign off the ground (if multiple departments must be involved) to communicating with your team effectively is covered.

If you are serious about understanding search marketing and how to implement a campaign throughout your site, or simply better understand what your search marketing team is doing, this book is a valuable resource and a textbook worthy of the marketing resource shelf.

A reader who is thinking of improving her website's rankings in search engines might consider this book as being about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It is most certainly not. SEO has a well deserved reputation as being one of the shady neighbourhoods of the Web. Moran and Hunt are not two smarmy coves wanting to beguile you about "chasing the algorithm".

Rather, they explain what this SEO thing often boils down to. The many subterfuges that its proponents practise, to gin up their search engine rankings. Or, the SEO "experts" sell these techniques to naive or complicit customers, under the promise of higher organic rankings. (Organic refers to rankings that are not paid for.)

Moran and Hunt describe several common SEO methods. Like having the web server recognise a search engine's spider when it visits the website. Then, the server returns the spider a page different from what a human in a browser would get. More elaborately, another method involves forming a link farm. A set of websites, perhaps run by different owners, that cross link to each other, in the hope of beefing up their page rankings at the search engines. Often, these link farms are characterised by links that do not arise naturally out of the text of a page. Instead, you usually get a set or table of links to "partners". Furthermore, these links are typically for very non sequitar topics.

The authors strongly urge you not to go down this route. Instead, they advocate something your high school teacher told you. Write text that is as interesting and useful to a reader as you can make it. They discuss many more subsidiary details, but this is the gist.

Ultimately, it is these eloquent and useful writings, in the form of your web pages, that will attract links from pages that are themselves highly ranked. Even if you have to manually beseech those other pages' authors to consider adding a link to you. Because they will read your pages, to assess if these are of any interest to their readers. Also, when regular readers read your pages, the better those are written, the more likely a reader might buy what's on sale, for example.

Good writing improves your bottom line.

En passant, pages 346 and 347 have a lovely summary of the war between the search engines and the search spammers. It succinctly describes the back and forth, point and counterpoint, as each side rallied new innovations.

I've read a dozen or so books on SEO. As owner of an SEO forum and an SEO service company, I rarely find print material that is actually on the level of the information that is readily available for free. Getting Hits by Don Sellers was disappointingly amateurish. Internet Marketing for Dummies by Frank Catalano and Bud Smith was full of cliches and probably counterproductive.

Search Engine Marketing Inc by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt was a shocker. I never expected this level of SEO knowledge in a book. And biggest shocker of all, it's accurate!

If you're serious about SEO, this one is a must-read.

I'm a web designer branching out into search engine optimization and marketing so that I can provide my clients the full package. This is just the book I need. The material is current, proven reliable, and covers everything I need to know to create a winning site, from design to dollars. I can't recommend it enough. Many thanks to the authors.

I've read just about every book written on SEO/SEM and this is by far the best! Search Engine Marketing Inc. is also about marketing strategy; in fact, there's a wealth of information one would never expect to find in a book about Search Engine Marketing.

The writing style is light, sometimes humorus, making Search Engine Marketing, Inc. an easy read; that's quite an achievement for a technical book.

Bill Hunt and Mike Moran's SEO/SEM book is unique because it tells you how to best set up a search team within your organization. The book also tells you how to evaluate external search vendors in order to decide if the company would be better off running a search campaign in house or by hiring an external vendor. Chapter 15 contains the best set of information on measuring success of any search campaign.

Search Engine Marketing, Inc. is like going to all the major search conferences, absorbing every bit of essential information and writing down the essence in one book. Buy the book.

I am writing this review because I think that the current reviews are a bit over the top. This book seems to cover the basics well, but at nearly 600 pages I find it overly wordy. The same information could be conveyed in a third of the space. There seems to be an abundance of information online on the topic of SEM but not a lot available in book form, which is probably because things change so quickly that books quickly become redundant. So in short, good for beginners, but more advanced users will probably be better off sticking with webmaster world and other forums and sites.

If anything, a bit too dense. A lot of it was aimed at medium to large size businesses with big retail sites to build/maintain. If you are like me, a small business guy, there must be something that covers what you need to know in 100 pages and skips the 350 you don't.