SEO Book Review

The SEO Book by Aaron Wall is a wide ranging book that is put together to teach you how to optimize your website to get more visitors by ranking high on the search engines.

The Industry

The Search Engine Optimization industry (SEO) is a very competitive industry as well as one full of the riff raff of the internet promising thousands and even millions of visitors and often offering old outdated information as well as very dodgy advice that can get you banned from any and all search engines if you put it into place.

Over the last few years I have read literally thousands of pages of information about how to build a better site, how to rank well in search engines and how to make more money online. In the early days most of the people selling or giving away information were truly saints, they gave good info and they gave it free. Over the last three years or so the SEO market has definitely changed as the money is bigger and optimizing for search engines has become more complex and changes on a regular basis so it is tough to keep up with.

Introducing the SEO Book

This is where Aaron Wall's Search Engine Optimization Book comes in. Aaron Wall first created the SEO Book in December 2003 and has constantly updated the book to keep up with changes. If you buy the SEO Book you get all of the changes. The SEO Book seems to be some kind of a labor of love to Aaron Wall as the updates are always coming, this os real commitment. Currently the SEO Book is 214 pages as it keeps on growing in response to the growing information that people need.

What about the other Internet Marketing Books?

One of the real drawbacks of many internet marketing books is their tight focus with no real application to other facets of your internet business. This is a place where the SEO Book really shines. There is a lot of details on what you need to do to make your site successful not only within the de=search engines but also other methods of gaining traffic to your site.

Who is this book for?

I look at the individual with one or more websites as the perfect customer for the SEO Book as it goes step by step into how to build your site to rate well (or fix it if it is bad). And then after a site is built what it takes to make the site bring in targeted traffic though various on and off page optimizations.

What is this book about?

Now for the details of the SEO Book. Although all e-books tend to have a money back guarantee it is still nice to know what kind of information that you are actually buying before you plunk down your credit card. This is the one thing that has always stopped me in the past when ever I have not been sure about a book. It is always nice to see all of the testimonials but they are worthless if the book is not targeting the type of information that you are really looking for.
Writing for search engines: When you write for people you are writing in a very free form style but search engines are built with algorithms that look for some things and avoid other things and can actually ban you if you do things that are considered by the search engine as being very wrong.

Interacting with search engines: This is a fantastic chapter as Aaron breaks down each of the top four search engines. These four engines combined account for over 95% of all searches that web surfers do on a daily basis. This chapter goes into getting listed, optimizing for and basically all of the factors that you should look at to rate highly in each of these search engines. This I believe is the most important chapter for those wondering what has gone wrong with all of the work that they have already done wrong on the web and I myself hung on every word in the chapter.

Pay per click: If you are not going to rank highly for a keyword than you can always pay the money to get traffic for that keyword with Google Adwords or Yahoo. This chapter is great and still gives you all of the essential details. Details that will give you 90% of what you need therefore you will be able to save money and get lots of traffic by ranking well for those ads.

Monitoring Results: Aaron Wall looks at building, optimizing and maintaining a website as a campaign and as with any campaign you only do well when you have a way to monitor your results and gains over time. This monitoring chapter goes into detail about what to do when things don't seem to be changing and ways to speed up your results.

Quick start checklist: This is actually the chapter that you should read first. This section takes a point form method to point out each of the different facets of your optimization methods. In this section Aaron Wall probably points out 100 things to look at and these topics have all been covered in detail in the book before this point.

My honest opinion of the book

Search engine optimization is a broad and very tricky area with secrets and expensive tips that no one is really sure if they want to pay for even if the info is worth it. In this review I have tried to detail all of the things that the SEO Book covers. Overall I have really enjoyed reading this book and it is hard to be objective about this book as I have not been able to find another book that covers the subject material in depth that this book does.

The SEO Book is not without it's flaws however. As well as it covers the most important off page topics, I am not sure that it covers on page topics quite as well. One other problem is that Aaron Wall covers pay per click and in that especially Google AdWords, the most common Pay per click program but there is just not room in the book to get into the very small details of what to look for to really dominate pay per click.

The SEO Book is $79 and I believe that at this price it is a great value. I have seen many books that sell for $29 but this book give you more and more accurate information than any internet optimizing book or material that I have ever seen.