Review by Jamie Beth Wachstein:

This book is truly unbelievable. It’s like having an SEO expert showing you and very simple, step-by-step instructions, how to get your website or blog ranked #1 on Google. When I launched my website, I was very frustrated to find that it wasn’t listed anywhere on the search engines.

After about 3 months, I was finally on page 3 of Google but has no traffic. So I was looking for an SEO book and found SEO Made Simple. When I was at the book store, there were a couple of others books on SEO but they were way too technical. The author of this book is an every day guy who cracked the Google code. This book is a MUST HAVE for anyone with a website or blog!

The book is separated into two parts. The first is about on-page optimization. Basically, it tells you what you need to do on your website to achieve #1 rankings. The second part, which focuses on off-page optimization reveals some great techniques for publishing your website across the Internet and generating TONS of in-bound links to your site in less than a week. Truly awesome book!

Review by Gary E. Albers:

I think it’s time that someone gives this book something other than a five star review which, in my opinion, it doesn’t merit. Toward that end, here’s my take:

Judging from the content of the many laudatory reviews, this book’s primary audience is among people who are amateurs or noobies in the field of website design and functionality. If your experience in designing a webpage is limited to a WYSIWYG editor, if you don’t understand XHTML, you’re not sure what tag, element, attribute or “meta” mean, then this book is probably appropriate to your level of knowledge.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being inexperienced. Everybody has to start at the beginning. However, if you are an experienced website designer who, hopefully, hand-codes your pages in XHTML and CSS, makes an effort to comply with current standards for the separation of structure and presentation, and are making more than a formal bow to the need for accessibility, then there is likely to be little of interest to you in this book.

To be fair, there are certainly many good pieces of advice here, despite the author using the first 20% of the ~100 pages to toot his own horn. However, there is little information that could not be found by spending a couple of hours searching the internet for SEO topics; i.e., almost all of what the author “reveals” is rather common knowledge. Again, in the interest of fairness, the author readily admits that he is not a code expert. As a result, there are very few useful examples of actual HTML markup code. The snippets that do exist would be old news to a real developer but, occurring without the context of a real document, would be of little use to a novice designer.The glossary at the end of the book, which takes up about 10% of an already suspiciously short volume, is the last place I would turn for a cogent definition of many of the terms he includes; e.g., “Cascading style sheets (CSS) – used to manipulate and easily manage the design of a website.” Hmmm…perhaps that definition could be improved and expanded a bit for the next edition.

As an ex-professional printer (many years ago), I was disappointed with the design and typography of this book. Besides coming across with too much similarity to the “Get Rich Quick with Real Estate Foreclosures” and “Dr. X’s New Wonder Diet” genre, the book is poorly edited (too many typos) and composed in a sans-serif typeface (alright, I admit to being biased against that), making it difficult to read for long lengths of time. Also, many of the screen capture illustrations are so small that I needed a magnifying class to read them. I applaud the quite-readable choice of a large point-size for the body type, but that also helps pad out to about 100 sparse pages what should have probably been nothing more than a pamphlet half that size.

To his credit, the author seems to have adhered to the pre-eminent rule of the medical profession: “First of all, DO NO HARM!” His advice is all good, if not exhaustive, and there is certainly something here for any newcomer to website functionality. He also does a good job of steering the reader away from the “black hat” techniques that may have been effective in the not too distant past. Kudos to him for that. But, in contrast to the many other reviews declaring this book as the be-all and end-all of SEO advice, I beg to differ. There are other books on the subject as good, or better, than this one. Given the short length, the sub-standard physical design and production, the pretty well known nature of most of the advice given, I suggest it is over-priced; a price more like .95 would come closer to the real value of this tome.

However, if you are a noobie who is being pressured by some self-proclaimed SEO expert, who is promising to get you on Google’s first page for the mere sum of 5, then buying and reading this book at its current price may very well be a real money-saving bargain! Bottom-line: it’s not a BAD book; it’s just not that GOOD! Caveat emptor!

Review by Anthony Lawrence:

I am one who has been very outspoken about the more shady SEO practitioners and about the ridiculously overprices “courses” that are heavily promoted on the Internet. SEO has acquired some of the taint of huckster marketing because of that.

I hope this book helps eliminate some of that. There’s no need to pay some self-styled “Internet Guru” hundreds or thousands of dollars for SEO secrets. There are no secrets: every concept, every “trick”, every piece of advice is available on the Internet for free. Of course you have to find it all, you have to learn what things are outdated, what advice doesn’t work – or you could find 99% here in this book.

Of course it’s not for everyone. It assumes some technical knowledge or at least access to someone with that knowledge. As an example, at several points 301 redirects are used as the solution certain SEO issues. Although some minor direction is given about implementing these, you’d need more than is provided here if you were a neophyte – someone using Blogger or [...] isn’t going to become proficient with Apache from reading this.

The only small complaint I can make is that sometimes the authors use too many examples, especially for the more basic concepts at the beginning of the book. However, too many is far better than too few, so I won’t complain too much. I definitely can’t complain that they left anything out: this could serve as a course book for a SEO class.

I’ll be recommending this strongly.

Review by wes unruh:

I did enjoy this overview of the SEO field. Granted, even though it has a first printing copyright of October 2009, there are already some outdated links, which only serves to highlight the incredible rate of development that the Internet engenders. This is an excellent introduction to a highly volatile field, and I was very impressed with the depth of subject matter. At the same time, I found the repetition from chapter to chapter of nearly identical text somewhat distracting, which is why I hesitate to give this book a full five stars.

In some ways, this book sets the stage for the next evolution in marketing. Pay-Per-Click does not have the return on investment that Search Engine Optimization can have, and the authors do a very good job of outlining exactly why this is – and while there are many, many different signals which can be manipulated to some extent by a search engine optimizer (optimist?) the authors do an excellent job explaining the many pitfalls that can arise when SEO is done incorrectly. Still, I was somewhat perplexed to note that two tools I rely on most heavily seemed completely overlooked in the text, those being Google Alerts (which provides me with endless supply of keyword-relevant content as it hits the net) and Market Samurai, an astoundingly useful tool in my keyword research process.

Review by Robert K. Tribit:

This book has been instrumental in helping me quickly understand the most accessible ways to optimize my site for search engines. There are no shorts cuts in this book. There are no promises. There are no guarantees. There is just straight “anecdotal” fact (as close as it can come to fact) with free helpful ways (links to tools) to scientifically test what the author suggests and recommends.

To be forthright, the authors do run or own SEO consulting companies, and there is every so gently a sales pitch slanted in that direction in this book, but rest assured that is only 1% of the books text, and it is of the nature “yes, this can get complicated, I’m still going to explain it to you, but I also understand if you are ready to hand this over to professionals, which we at will gladly help you with.”

However, seriously, don’t let that concern you or let it get in the way of taking a gander at this book. If you are a neophyte in SEO and haven’t been keeping up for a few years, I highly recommend this book to get you back up to speed with the current state of the art. The information is comprehensive, and if you ever think the author is talking through his hat and making stuff up…just go to google or bing with what he suggests and check it out for yourself. Most of the techniques are trivial to implement and silly not to in the same realm of “what can it hurt to try it”.

This book specifically advises against what you deep down know and suspect to be wrong. Link spamming, keyword stuffing, and many other exotic but disingenuous SEO techniques. His best advice is to make content that is worthwhile for someone to check you out and the search engines to link people to you…otherwise…really…do you deserve traffic? Along with that, how to make that content “optimized” for search engine consumption. It’s startling in it’s simplicity, but it’s good to know that there are some well understood techniques that may only take slight modification of what you are already doing naturally.

I read this book in a week and that was a busy week for me no less. I made notes of what I needed to do, what applied for me and my site, and have implemented 75% of my plan in the same week. I now look forward to the perpetual carrying out of the remaining 25% as a light and interesting burden.

Review by Jennifer Klein:

I have never taken the time to write a review about anything, but I wanted to give credit where credit was due. I have been in the Internet Marketing industry for 12 years and looking to enhance my career with SEO knowledge. I have read 2 other SEO books and countless SEO articles online. The SEO for 2010 book is the most detailed, “how-to” guide I have found to date. I love how it specifically recommends what tools to use, where to go for more information, and all the “white-hat” advice. With so many companies offering SEO services, it’s hard to decipher which advice to take. The recommendations in this book match some of the industry articles I have read, which lead me to believe I can trust what the authors are teaching. Even though there are some typos in the kindle version, I honestly don’t mind since the content is otherwise well written. Can’t wait to get the 2011 version which I am sure will speak about the Yahoo and Microsoft Search Alliance (I hope).

Review by Allen Stenger:

This well-written and informative book on getting your web site noticed by users boils the advice down to one sentence: “Your content should always be written for humans first, and search engines second!” It emphasizes building attractive content first, then removing any roadblocks that would prevent search engines from finding it.

The book is an interesting blend of high-level strategy and low-level techie tools and techniques. The mostly likely audience is actually webmasters more than web designers or marketers, although all would benefit from it. The most valuable part for me was the review of the many management tools, most of them free, available for studying your web site.

The web standards part doesn’t really get a lot of attention in this book. No one today is going to seriously argue against following web standards. The advice in this book is limited to “use HTML elements for what they were designed for,” with a promise that that will improve your search rankings. For example, it recommends using the various header levels to structure your document instead of just using boldface and bigger type, and it recommends using tables only for tabular date and using CSS for precise placement of a mosaic of elements.

A lot of what’s here is not really about findability but about making your site worth finding, and about how to hold on to your audience once they’ve found the site. It covers techniques such as mailing lists (old technology but still very valuable), RSS feeds, user-generated content (such as product reviews), and blogs. The book makes the interesting point that authoring for search engines is very similar to authoring for the visually impaired. If you are careful to make your site accessible to humans, it will automatically be more accessible to search engines. There is specific advice on handling blogs, JavaScript menu systems, Shockwave Flash, and Ajax.

Review by K. Mitchell:

I went to the book store looking for a book on blogging and spotted this unusual title ‘Building Findable Websites’. Within the first few moments of thumbing through the book, I knew I was going to get it. I already had several search engine optimization books, but this one talked about SEO and so much more. It even had a chapter on blogging.

What strikes me most about this book is that literally every page has website resources or bits of code. The second most striking this is the author does not fill page after page of why to do something. The whys are kept to the point and jump right into the hows. This book is not filled with dozens of interviews or inspirational stories though it does have real world examples which the author provides links to so the reader can get more detail. I really liked the example of BMW Germany getting blacklisted from Google for blackhat SEO tactics.

The author also has a great companion website to the book which includes 5 bonus chapters, the table of contents for the book, website tools and code used in the book. Since Amazon doesn’t have a ‘Search Inside’ on this book, you can read the bonus chapters to get a feel for the book and the author. Also be sure and check out his blog at [...] where you can see samples of his work and a list of books he uses as references two of which I’ve decided to get as well.

After reading this book, I appreciate the difference between findability versus SEO. This book focuses on best practices and web standards of which SEO is only a part of.

Review by Randall Degges:

I just finished reading SEO Warrior today. I’m a professional developer (mostly systems engineering in C, python, and java), but I dabble in best-practices web design on my spare time for fun. I picked up a copy of this book as I’ve heard a lot about “SEO” in the industry, but wasn’t sure whether or not it was something real, or just a buzz word.

The author of this book, John I. Jerkovic does an excellent job not only detailing exactly how SEO works, but also why it works, what is good, and what is bad. The book starts out by proving certain SEO elements are legitimate, by using some perl program to perform a large amount of searches for popular keywords, then compare HTML elements of the top ranked sites to see what they have in common (keyword density, title element, meta tags, etc.) In my opinion, this alone was worth the money, as it clearly shows by real-world example, that SEO does work, and proves what elements are more important than others.

The material covered is very thorough (and at times, a bit too wordy), and will leave you with no questions unanswered. The author covers:

- tools to help you test your websites for SEO

- how to use google, yahoo, and bing searches to look for competitors

- how to use google, yahoo, and bing optimizations elements in your HTML pages to promote “organic SEO”

- how to avoid search engine spam

- how the nofollow attribute works

- how to create a sitemap

- how to write a robots.txt file

- where to look for relevant information on SEO

- how to use advertising to your advantage

- how to get money by showing ads on your website

- how to find and detect blackhat SEO

- how to use social media sites (twitter, facebook, etc.) to establish your brand

and a good deal of other topic.

The book is a bit thick, coming in at around 400 pages of content, but has quite a few diagrams illustrating google, yahoo, and bing webmaster tools (among other things), which take up ~5 -> 10% of the total pages. It is a very easy read, not very heavy on coding, but also not too high level.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who does web design themselves, and is interested in making their pages popular, but doesn’t really know anything about SEO. The book teaches you everything you’ll need to know, and takes you from nothing to everything in a few days.

Review by Jon in Florida:

Excellent overview of SEO. The author touches on all areas related to SEO, not always in great detail which is understandable as some topics could warrant their own book but he covers enough of each to give you a thorough understanding. Please be advised that all the code script examples are opensource based, php primarily. If you are a ASP.NET, C# app builder they won’t help you that much but the general idea is communicated through the examples which you can figure out in your language of choice. A must book for your SEO collection.

Review by Sydney:

I was looking for an SEO book that was easy to follow and would give me all of the information and directions I would need to help my website become more successful and this book did the job. Instructions were clear, precise and easy to follow. With the help of this book my website has increased the amount of people visiting it which as we all know is always beneficial. I highly recommend; this SEO book.

Review by Q. Corp:

This is the best book I have found for both Google and Bing optimization. I own a restaurant and as welding dupply. My business showed up on page 26 of a Google search. After reading this book I have implimented about 25% of it and I am already on page 2 of Google and page 1 of Bing for my search terms. And thanks to this book, I know how to see what my rankings are on Google and Bing. I highly recommend this book.

UPDATE

I have since hired Sean Odom to do my SEO work on all of my websites and he had them as number 1 on all of my search terms! Great Job!

Review by Paul Kruger:

I will keep this short and simple. I am a web developer ( stuffdone.com ) but not an SEO expert. I thought I would start to learn more.

I bought the book.

I followed the instructions.

I now have THREE different sites on page one of Yahoo ( without paying them their 9 fee! )

and one on page one of Google. All within two weeks of reading the book.

It works !

The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing

Review by M. OBrien:

This is a great book for anyone just getting started with Search Engine Marketing as the author gives a great overview of the steps needed to set up pay per click campaigns.

Advanced users might find it a bit basic, but that’s not who this book is designed for. This book is designed for the small business owner who knows Search Engine Marketing is an important web traffic driver for his/her business, needs to get up to speed fast, and wants someone to explain it sequentially.

The author does a great job in setting up Search Engine Marketing step-by-step in an easy to follow way that should be very helpful to anyone who has never run a marketing team and needs to learn to do this themselves.

There are more advanced books out there for those who need to delve into the nitty-gritty, but if you are just getting started, and are a non-technical person who wants easy to follow instructions, then this book is a must read.

Review by Bhavana Musuluri:

I’m stealing one of the often used words in the book to define the book itself – remarkable. This book is fantastic and easy to read. As you read each chapter, the authors take you through each step in successfully marketing your products. This book is not filled with theories, but it rather cleverly explains each winning strategy which is relevant in this day and age, and then sums up each chapter with a list of things to do to implement the strategy. The best part is that anybody who is willing to invest time and brains can use this book as a reference and start creating value to their company immediately and of course build on it overtime. The book shows new techniques that doesn’t require an old-school marketing guru with tens of years of experience. In fact, a person with a little bit of creativity can use this book to REALLY get customers and sell their products.

Couple of other things that I liked about the book are the particular examples (other organizations/blog articles/etc) that were provided and the cartoons – who doesn’t enjoy a chuckle every few pages?

Absolute bang for your buck and once you pick up the book, you will finish it!

Review by Neil Davidson:

This excellent book is aimed at the 99% of the business world who are faintly befuddled by the strange world of youtube and delicious that they find themselves living in. It’s aimed at plumbers, hairdressers, lawyers and oil company executives; at people in large corporations and small businesses alike who are dimly aware that their working lives are about to change – indeed, have already started to change in disconcerting ways – and who don’t know what to do.

The premise of the book is that the old marketing is dead or dying. Gone are the days where simply throwing money at print or radio advertising guaranteed succees. Instead, you need to engage your customers. Give them reasons to come to visit your web site, and once they are there give them reasons to come back again and again. Turn your web site into a hub, stuffed with remarkable blog posts, videos and interviews. As the authors put it (they have a pleasing way with words) “ten years ago, your marketing effectiveness was a function of the width of your wallet. Today, your marketing effectiveness is a function of the width of your brain.”

“Inbound marketing” is clearly – and explicitly – inspired by authors such as Seth Godin and David Meerman Scott. But where this book differs is in its emphasis on hands-on advice. Not only is it inspirational, but it’s also brimming with practical wisdom. Sure, it talks about the power of Twitter. But then it gives you advice on how to choose a twitter handle. Sure, it talks about the rise of the superstar blogger and the death of the press release. But then it talks about how to decide whether you need a PR agency and, if you do, then how you should hire one. Sure, it stresses that your employees will need to learn new skills if they are to survive in this new world. But then it talks about what those skills are, what steps your employees need to take to get them and how you can track how they’re doing. Each chapter contains a checklist of things you should do, right now, to start improving your inbound marketing.

This is no dry textbook. It’s full of anecdotes, some from the usual suspects (Whole Foods, Zappos and Barack Obama) but from others too: accounting software, a shutter manufacturer and a PR firm among others. It’s well written, and there are cartoons too.

Inbound marketing – get found using Google, social media and blogs is an excellent, mainstream introduction to new marketing. If you want to dip your toes into the cold water of social media then buy a copy. If you know all about social media then you almost certainly know people who need this book. Buy them a copy from Amazon. They’ll love you for it.

Review by MediaWorks Publishing:

This book is very well written and has step by step instructions to create and optimize your website for all the new search engines. I find this book the easiest of all the books to read and understand how to apply the items to my website.

Review by Diane Cipollo:

Creating a website that can be found among all the other sites on the web has always been important to the success of any site. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is as important to the marketing of a website as image optimization is to its graphic design. For dynamic-driven websites such as BellaOnline, it is a continuous challenge to maintain search engine optimization. This book by Jaimie Sirovich and Cristian Darie is written for the PHP programmer who needs to understand the many technical issues involved when programming a search-engine-friendly site from attracting search engine spiders to site promotion. Throughout the book, you will find code examples and practice exercises which show how to implement the techniques covered in the book.

The authors begin with a discussion of the programming environment including setting up the MySQL server and then move on to tools and resources for the IT professional and the basics of search engine optimization. One of the most important aspects of search engine optimization is the URL. The URLs that you generate for your pages must not only be search engine friendly but also people friendly. The authors discuss how to make the task of creating and managing search-engine-friendly URLs easier. Another problem you will encounter is duplicate content which will harm your site’s search engine rating. The authors discuss many ways to prevent or minimize this problem such as using robots.txt and meta exclusion.

Your site visitors enjoy those cool looking interactive features, such as fancy menus, that can be created using JavaScript, Ajax and Flash. These same features make it difficult for search engines to find your site. However, web readers have come to expect a certain amount of interactivity and without at least a few of these goodies, your site will be bland by today’s standards. The authors discuss this problem and cover several ways to help such as generating SEO images and the use of graphic text.

One of the most popular ways to promote a website is with RSS feeds and syndication. To be effective, these feeds must be updated as new content is added to your site. This can be time consuming especially if your site is updated several times a minute. Two answers to this problem offered by the authors are to automate the generation of RSS feeds with a PHP class and displaying feeds with SimplePie.

A standard for a good search engine friendly site is a good sitemap system. As with RSS feeds, keeping a sitemap updated can be a challenge and the authors show you how to create a traditional and an XML-based sitemap. Once your site is live, your job as an IT professional has just begun. There are many SEO technical issues the authors touch on including maintaining your site, changing hosts and cross linking.

One thing that makes a technical-heavy book like this more helpful is a working example that incorporates what you have learned. The case study for this book is an E-commerce store and catalog. The authors have also covered how to enhance a pre-existing site to be more search engine friendly and how to create a search engine optimized blog using WordPress.

Jaimie Sirovich is a search engine marketing consultant, programmer and administrator for the search engine marketing blog SEOEgghead. Cristian Darie is a software engineer and author of several books and tutorials on AJAX, ASP.NET, PHP and SQL. [...]

Review by Nathan Smith:

Last year, I reviewed the book Ajax and PHP by Cristian Darie. Since then, he and I have kept in touch. When he asked if I would like to read his latest writing endeavor, Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP, I was immediately interested. He joined Jaimie Sirovich in co-authoring this one, and they are also writing a companion version on SEO with ASP.NET. Their ASP.NET edition will be available in August of 2007. First off, here’s a bit of background info about the authors.

Jaimie Sirovich is a self-titled “SEO Egghead” and is a hybrid programmer turned search engine marketer. What makes him uniquely qualified is that he understands the tech side of SEO and isn’t just a slimey snake oil salesman who spouts off conjecture. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.

Cristian Darie is a software engineer and PhD student, currently studying distributed application architecture for his dissertation. He has published several books on a variety of web topics – including: Ajax, ASP.NET, PHP and SQL. Needless to say, he is himself quite the server-side programmer as well.

The book starts off by defining who it is written for: PHP programmers and search engine marketers. Programmers will benefit because this book talks about the factors that help improve readability of URLs for both humans and search engines. For instance, using Apache’s mod_rewrite to create:

(…)

As opposed to:

(…)

Marketers will benefit from this book because rather than rely on the myriad of disinformation that is available (leading one another in circular logic), they can start to understand things from a more concrete perspective and begin to make more accurate assessments. If it’s true that All Marketers are Liars, then at least they will sound more convincing when it comes to SEO.

Once the basics are out of the way, this book delves into more tangible code examples, showing how to use .htaccess redirects as well as HTTP responses to your advantage. They also cover the concept of cloaking, such as employed by the New York Times, allowing search engines to index their content, but not cache it. This enables them to rank high in relevant search results, but also requires a subscription to read it. Apparently, Google turns a blind eye for big business, but potentially punishes smaller sites for such practices.

They also explain how to use “white hat” methods such as IP sniffing, to make sure that international readers receive pages that are relevant to their particular locale. While not always 100% accurate, this can assist in returning pages in the correct language for a particular country or region.

Additionally, they explain how to use sitemap XML and text files to describe to Google and Yahoo, respectively, the information architecture of your site. This is helpful for sites which are inherently inaccessible due to excessive use of Flash or Ajax. While it’s certainly no substitute for semantic code, at least search engines know you have more than just an index page.

Overall, this book is great. I appreciate their description of both accepted and unethical SEO, rather than obscuring dirty “black hat” tricks. Acknowledging these methods exist is necessary in order to spot them. While I don’t go out of my way for SEO when developing a site, I certainly don’t want to knowingly or ignorantly do anything that would hinder a site’s visibility.