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134 of 140 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not Necessarily for Dummies, April 20, 2005
I suppose with an average of 5-Stars my review ranking makes me the curmudgeon since I offer only 3-Stars. Dummies books many times become complicated because they flounder around instead of getting straight to the subject matter, this book is no exception. While offering a plethora of important and valuable information the writings start, stop and go back and forth too often. I was armed with a highlighter and notepad but found myself constantly referencing back and forth, forced to re-read passages to collect all the data important to optimize according to the authors recommendations.
An example is discussing topics, which engage the readers interest only to suddenly stop with, "More on this subject in Chapter X." Ok, so I put my highlighter down until later. This becomes frustrating. Discuss highlights in the book with an introduction and get to the point in one place, not later in several places. The checklist offered on the inside cover is a nice highlight and covering the topics once again in an introduction should be enough and will lead to less confusion.
As with all tech books, without any fault to the author, the subject matter becomes dated quickly. This is the case with SEO for Dummies but the basics offered are valuable as a starting point in optimizing your web site. Although keywords, content and reciprocal linking are stressed heavily, my own inadvertent experiment has shown content to actually be at least as valuable if not more important than incoming links for high-ranking sites. As an example, I have two web-blogs with Google rankings of 2 and 3 respectively which have virtually no incoming links only a lot of content. In these cases content proves extremely valuable. These blogs are relatively young.
The author makes an attempt to explain Googles algorithm but fails miserably to make a point, and serves no purpose in advancing SEO knowledge and very little is mentioned about the Google "Sandbox" which is the initial purgatory new sites are sent to while Google decides a web sites worthiness. Understanding the sandbox in extremely important so the Webmaster pro or amateur realizes page ranking comes with sweat equity and patience.
My largest disappointment came when visiting the authors web site which was not up to date and had several "dead links." At this writing his Google site ranking is 5/10, which is very good but one must practice what they preach and these instances were glaring errors. Another problem is the author spends time discounting the use of "Frames/Frameset" but his site uses frames as viewed in the source code. If they should be avoided why does his site contain them?
I recommend this book if purchased with a deep discount. Next thoroughly read and digest the research information at www.marketingexperiments.com and incorporate all your information and experience into a business plan using their template. In combination with SEO for Dummies your site will be enhanced for SEO and you'll have a deeper understanding of Google and other methods of SEO to increase site traffic as well as page ranking.
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71 of 80 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Book, February 3, 2005
I am a neophyte in web design and have a tech person in another city who has just started doing web design. She designed our websites but was not up on optimazation, and I wasn't either. We both ordered the book and have now designed two websites using it.
The first searches fairly well but it wasn't being found at all until we used the suggestions/instructions from the book so it certainly helped.
The second site was designed using the suggestions for titles, descriptions and keywords. I also believe the designer used all of the other directions for other parts of the site. We are just trying to get the site recognized at this point.
I would have to say, at least for myself, we would have not known any of the "secrets" to getting recognized without using the book. I am confident over time we wil get both sites readily recognized by the engines. It does seem to be somewhat of a science and the book help a lot.
I personally highly recommend the book and I don't normally give out 5's for anything, a big help.
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36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A comment from the author, May 4, 2004
By A Customer
I'm the author of Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, and just wanted to make a few comments. I'd like to begin by thanking the first two reviewers for their great reviews ... It's always nice to know people appreciate one's work! A quick comment about Ethan's review (the first). Ethan's search-engine rank began rising within two days. I just want to explain that while this sometimes does happen, it's not the norm! I've also had pages rise this quickly in Google, as have many other site owners. But we were very lucky (of course, you have to "make" your own luck to some degree). Often (usually?), though, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is more difficult, so I don't want everyone thinking my book is full of magic spells. I explain what it takes, and some readers will be in the happy situation of seeing almost instant results, but for many it will mean more work. I've been writing computer books quite some time; I may well have written more books about the Internet than any other author on this (or perhaps any other) planet. I wrote the Complete Idiot's Guide to the Internet, the widely reviewed and praised Poor Richard's Web Site, and many others. Over the years I think I've learned how to break down a subject into its composite pieces, then feed them to the reader in a way that makes the subject understandable. This is an unusual subject, though! The companies that own the search engines don't want anyone to know exactly how their systems work, and as a result there's a huge amount of conjecture and guesswork in this area ... and some of it's just plain wrong. So in this book my job was not only to explain a subject in simple terms, but to try to cut through the nonsense. I'll occasionally be adding updates and notes to my site, SearchEngineBulletin.com, so please visit. I hope you enjoy the book! Peter Kent
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