Tech Comm Student

SEO: Your Visual Blueprint For Effective Internet Marketing

I recently ordered Kristopher Jones’s new book on how to optimize websites for search engine effectiveness. His introduction includes a brief history of SEO as well as an overview of general tips for success. Afterward, I was surprised to find that the next 284 pages basically consist of explaining how exactly to accomplish his given advice; You won’t find much theory here. Each topic is clearly labeled in the upper left corner, with an average topic length of about two pages.

Certainly this makes the book easy to pick up for quick referencing, but seems to lack the depth that I had expected from a book so thick. And while I understand this to be a newcomers guide to search engine optimization, some of Jones’s advice includes the idea of throwing money at a problem to have someone else do the job for you.

But what Jones does do well is introduce an absolute beginner to the most basic concepts of web design and SEO and then shares some more advanced techniques to those of us with a little more experience. His examples are very clear, and he provides in many cases, numerous ways of approaching an objective. Some of the topics he covers include: creating a meta robot tag, using text modifiers, optimizing your website for multiple browsers, designing a sitemap, re-writing URLs, and utilizing redirects. He also spends some time venturing into creating communities on the web and publishing successful blog posts, finding suitable linking partners, and submitting your articles to directories. While some of this information may seem overly redundant to an experienced web user, he presents useful advice even for the lesser novice among us.

I do recommend this book if you are just starting your web publication journey, or perhaps have a basic understanding of SEO, but feel that you lack the knowledge or skills to be effective. There is a lot of information out on the web regarding search engine optimization, but if you want to be sure you’re receiving advice from a trustworthy source, this book might be an important one to keep close by while you develop your online content.