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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Dummies by Peter Kent - Book Review
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Search Engine Optimization for Dummies (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2008), ISBN 978-0-470-26270-2), or SEO for Dummies for short is a very good book for beginners, published by Peter Kent. It is also a useful book for more advanced users, with some good references to items such as news and article syndication service. But its best feature is his discussion of Google PageRank. On that topic, this is no book for dummies - but a good read for anyone interested in SEO!
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By Jason McDonald
Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group.
Posted: January 25, 2010
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Contents:
Search Engine Optimization for Dummies 
Search Engine Optimization for Dummies is a good book for beginners, and has some useful reference material on SEO for even the advanced users. Unlike the authors of some of the more "sophisticated" books, like The Art of SEO or SEO Warrior, author Peter Kent stays true to the Dummies theme and makes most of the material easy to understand. The book is well organized with chapters on "Planning your Search Engine Strategy,"" "Picking Powerful Keywords," and "Finding Traffic via Geo-Targeting." My biggest complaints about the book are, of course, its age (being published in 2008 it is already out-of-date), and its overemphasis on directories. For most businesses, Google is where it is at. Google is over 70% of search in most markets, and if you aren't being found on Google, being found on some esoteric directory in Serbia isn't really going to help you! In this way, Kent misleads the reader into overemphasizing directories to the detriment of Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Those three dominate the search landscape. Throw in the Yahoo director, Dmoz.org, and Google Local - and well, you have pretty much thrown in everything that really matters for most companies.
The book also has pretty good references, a companion website, and some of the chapters are available via Google Books (here). So it takes the first steps towards being Internet friendly.
I try to read at least two SEO books per month, to stay current and informed on the SEO industry - so SEO for Dummies was one of my picks for January. In this brief online blog post, I am going to focus on two areas in which the book excels: the difference between new vs. repeat visitors and Kent's excellent discussion of Google PageRank.
New Visits vs. Repeat Visitors Most marketers know that it is more difficult to "acquire" a new customer than it is to keep an old customer coming back. As they say, "Make new friends, keep the old, one is silver, one is gold." This is an obvious distinction, but Kent's is the first SEO book that I have read that makes a good point about measuring your new vs. repeat visitors vs. your SEO efforts. He points out, in particular, that most website visits do not start at search engines. Most of your customers will come to your website directly from bookmarks or simply typing in your company's URL. But most new visitors will come from the search engines, especially Google.
Why is this important? Well, first of all, understanding how difficult it is to get a new visitor will help you put your SEO efforts into perspective. Many people get frustrated when they see that their SEO volume can be only a fraction of their total web volume - maybe as low as 1%, or more commonly 10% of all visitors coming from the search engines. Management, in particular, may look at your web logs and think that the time spent on SEO could be better spent elsewhere. But nothing is further from the truth. SEO is all about showing up No. 1 on Google, Yahoo, or Bing searches, and that is where you get your new visitors from! At that point, your job is about engaging them, making your website sticky and what not.
SEO gets you the dates. But your website consummates the marriage! Seen in that light, SEO is your Google matchmaker, and each match is extremely important. Kent makes this point forcefully, and it is a good one.
That said, he doesn't spend enough time on Google Local or Yelp - two important (relatively) new sources of new visitors. Nor does he discuss the layout and psychology of landing pages - critical to consummating the sales relationship! The book shows its age a bit, in this sense, and I always recommend to my students that they spend time on Google Local and Yelp, especially if they are a business that benefits from local searches. Finally, he does discuss the Yellow Pages in quite some detail, but as we move into 2010 it is hard to see Yellow Page searches as critically important (outside of a link-building strategy), and again for cost- and time-sensitive SEOers, I would recommend focusing on Google Local and Yelp rather than your stodgy old phone company.
Google PageRank and SEO, Explained Although this is a book for Dummies, or Beginners, Kent does a great job discussing Google's famous (or infamous) PageRank. PageRank, for all intents and purposes, is a measurement of your websites authority vs. others. Download the Google Toolbar and begin paying attention to your PageRank as well as that of other websites. That said, most SEO practioners believe that outbound links hurt your website and incoming links help it. Kent is skeptical, especially about the former.
Outbound links do not hurt your PageRank, or at least not enough to matter, says Kent. Reciprocal links probably do not help much, he says, and he advocates a website design the lumps most of your outbound links to one particular page on the site. More interestingly, he talks about how larger websites have slightly more powerful PageRanks (another reason to bulk up your website with content!). PageRank on the Google Toolbar is also logarithmic, meaning that a 10 is worth a lot, lot more than a 9, which is worth a lot, lot more than an 8, etc.
Finally, he clarifies the idea of Page Relevance, meaning getting links from sites similar to your own. Links from your own community, in short, are worth more than links from non-related websites - again, a countervailing power to just a simple view of PageRank. I have struggled many times attempting to explain PageRank to students, and this is really one of the better discussions. I am especially relieved to have someone else explaining that outgoing links are not detrimental - just keep them within reason, and confined them to one or two pages on your site, and you will be fine.
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