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Book Review: The Art of SEO - Mastering Search Engine Optimization

Enge, Eric; Spencer, Stephan; Rishkin, Rand; Stricchiola, Jessie. The Art of SEO - Mastering Search Engine Optimization. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2010. Print. - ISBN: 978-0-596-51886-8. There's Matt Cutts, and then one circle out in the Dante inferno of Google there are the four authors of this book. Does that make it a good book? Yes. A great book, no.

By Jason McDonald Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group. Posted: November 22, 2009

Contents:

SEO By Committee
Hidden Google SEO Tools
Return to the Forest

SEO by Committee

The point of the JM Internet Group is to bring SEO to the masses. Well, if not the masses, to bring SEO to marketers and small businesspeople who have better things to do with their time than debate the esoterica of Google, Yahoo, or Bing. There are people out there who do not even know who Matt Cutts is, nor care. Then there are people out there who are Matt Cutts' best friend, or at least want to be his best friend. (For those of you who don't know, Matt Cutts (Google him!) is Google's official SEO Web guru.) If Google is North Korea, then Mr. Cutts is Google's official spokesperson - if you are into SEO, you should analyze his every move, but never forget that he works for Google and so he gives the party line.

The four guru's who wrote this book are knowledgeable SEO experts, and one might say even more knowledgeable than I am about the esoterica of SEO. I'll gladly admit that. It's a good book on SEO, but I wouldn't recommend it for the casual reader. It's more a book about SEO for SEO people, and not the (desperately needed) good book on SEO for the masses. More than anything, the book suffers from the book-by-committee feel, and in general, it is afraid to go out on any limb about anything.

But that's not its worst failing. Its worst fault is that it has pages upon pages of details without any big picture about what SEO is, and how SEO should fit into your larger marketing plan. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is actually pretty simple when you think about it:

1. State your business proposition: what do you sell?
2. Determine your customers' keywords.
3. Optimize your website (on page) via Page Tags and website structure.
4. Solicit high quality links based on your keywords.
5. Monitor your rank and metrics.

Done. That's the big picture of forest, which is all but absent from this book. It is there, but it's spoken in big one dollar words and one dollar chapter headings, when a really good book would speak plain English. "SEO in Plain English" - now there's a thought, check out Common Craft... Reader submissions?

You can order the book through Amazon, and you'd think there would be a book website, but I haven't found one neither through Amazon, nor through O'Reilly. Hm. That's strange.

Hidden Google SEO Tools

As an SEO person, I am always reading these new SEO books to try to find unknown gems. In this book, the ones that really caught my eye were the discussions on esoteric Google commands (advanced search) that you can really use. One, for example, was the use of the ~ and the * commands to tell Google to look for related keywords.

A search for ~SEO, for example, tells Google to look for words related to SEO. You think look at the bolded search results and it's a way of having Google tell you what keywords it thinks are synonyms or close relatives of that term. Similarly the * operator can be used as a wildcard in a search and thereby reveal search phrase ideas. SEO * yields ideas like SEO Toolbar, SEO Cheat Sheet, and others.

I haven't had time to fully digest the esoteric tables in the book that have these and other Google operators, but I wish that the authors had given us more on this. In a cryptic note, for example, they explained that you can actually get more information on link data through Google blog search than through the direct search operator. The book also encouraged me to sign up for Bing's Webmaster tools, where I found a new Microsoft plug-in for Excel that is supposed to help also with keyword discovery.

So, frustratingly, when it was time for some true tree data (and not forest big picture), the book left me hanging. Food for thought, yet. Detailed analysis of how to use these Google esoterica, no. That's always the danger in this sort of a book - too complex for the novice reader, and not nuanced enough for a more experienced practioner. But it is a good book, and I take back my previous negativity: do go ahead and buy it. We need more, not less, SEO books!

Return to the Forest

As you read this book, therefore, or rather before you read this book, you need a general plan of attack of your SEO strategy. Or tear out the table of contents, and put it beside you as you read because the book is lots of small type with few breakouts and big picture ideas. So it is very easy to get lost.

But if you have a focused mind on your big picture, you can find some useful esoterica in the book, especially in the advanced search operators for Google. Yet more free ways to generate keywords and research backlinks - two of the three most important aspects of SEO (alongside page tags).