Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization-affectionately called by its acronym SEO-is a wild-west frontier of the Internet: a boisterous new field with burgeoning revenues that employs tens of thousands of people with job titles and descriptions that did not exist five years ago.
In the SEO arena, gaudy patent-medicine *get rich quick* hucksterism meets successful marketing techniques (and people who do make a great deal of money), and both meet the nuts and bolts of a technology framework.
Like a beautiful spy with limpid eyes and unknowable depths, or an iceberg with 95% of its mass hidden beneath the surface of an arctic ocean, SEO can appear wondrous, mysterious, and baffling.
Less poetically, the core of SEO is the art and science of promoting web pages so they are high in natural search engine rankings. (A natural search engine result is one that is not paid for, as opposed to paid advertising links that also appear on search-results pages.)
Extended SEO has come to mean the whole field of marketing in relationship to web properties-so it is not unusual these days to have an SEO expert propose paid advertising via Google AdWords or another program as an adjunct to core SEO techniques.
I?m pleased that my book Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense, AdWords, and the Google APIs has been doing well (it?s shown up on Amazon?s list of computer bestsellers in the last few weeks).
My book is about the landscape of making money on the web: how to create content that will make money, how to monetize that content with Google's AdSense program, how affiliate programs work, how to effectively use Google's AdWords program to promote traffic, and how to program custom applications related to Google's advertising programs.
In other words, this is a practical book aimed at helping you make money, but it is primarily about effectively using technology. There are two chapters in the book (out of 16 chapters) that discuss SEO issues from a nuts and bolts perspective.
So I was pleased when O?Reilly (the publisher of my book) asked me to write a short electronic book specifically about SEO. You can download Search Engine Optimization: Building Traffic and Making Money as a PDF.
Like Google Advertising Tools: Cashing in with AdSense, AdWords, and the Google APIs, my SEO PDF is not get-rich-quick hype, and is focused on concise nuts and bolts issues. It doesn't really tackle marketing techniques at a strategic level (which I am looking forward to doing soon).
Posted by Harold Davis at May 27, 2006 9:54 PM
