GeekSpeak

SEO Books

By Johnny Fuery ⋅ March 26, 2007 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

A colleague of mine asked about printed SEO resources today, and I realized I haven’t read too many books on the topic.

I have looked through these three:

Google’s PageRank and Beyond
Very geeky, lots of math (the linear algebra kind, not the arithmetic kind), but still readable. A good read for anyone claiming to be an SEO expert, because an understanding of PageRank is a huge portion of the prerequisite training. On the other hand, there’s no practical instructions in it, i.e., “do this and it will grow your search engine rankings”.

101 Ways to Promote Your Site
I like this one, because it covers other stuff aside from just SEO — email promotions, blogging, etc are mentioned. Lots of practical data, but the language is pretty elementary. Things like “establish brand awareness” take up entire sections, which is extraneous data in terms of what I’m looking for. Probably worth a quick read with a notebook to jot down the 20 good ideas out of the 500 presented.

Search Engine Optimization [in] an hour a day
Same audience as the book above, but more focused on just web/seo. As I recall, however, half the book is useless — what is SEO, why do we care, what search engines are, etc. Ok as a primer, but the last chapter/section was the only part I even skimmed.