The Art of SEO - mastering search engine optimisation

Front page of the book. A humming bird on a green background.
This book covers all the key concepts in a concise and authoritative way.

This book achieves what its authors set out to do and is excellent value for money. A must read book for anyone managing a website.

Buy the book from Amazon and save money!

I want to thank Simon Swan from the Met Office for recommending this book to me.

If you want a single manual to cover everything currently worth knowing about SEO and the search marketing industry, then this is the book for you.

Each of the four authors is a recognised expert in SEO with many years of working on SEO projects. Their aim has been to produce a book that will be a comprehensive reference tool for SEO practitioners at all levels.

The structure is clear and progresses logically, showing how to apply relevant techniques for SEO at each stage of website planning, build, implementation, maintenance and monitoring.

The style of writing is a readable blend of informality and authority, which helps to lighten the impact of the 500 pages. There are many diagrams and tables and lots of examples of code to help you get the job done. Any bias towards the USA is only apparent when dealing with marketing statistics, as the core material is universally relevant to the internet.

It is left to the reader to decide how to use the book. If you want to ensure you have grasped the fundamentals so you can develop your own expertise, the authors suggest reading all the chapters in numerical order. Given the substantial nature of each chapter, it would have been helpful if the basic essentials could have been highlighted.

A particular challenge of SEO is that it is always evolving and changing and this is an underlying theme throughout the book. Guidance on handling aspects of change are dealt with wherever they occur and readers are shown how to commit to ongoing market research and incorporate SEO into all aspects of their business culture.

Finally, the attention to detail in the index is impressive as this is an important tool for getting the most out of the book. The index is substantial throughout and gives extensive coverage of key topics such as content, keywords, links, search engines and spam.

To buy the book

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Title:

The Art of SEO - Mastering Search Engine Optimisation 

Author:

Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin and Jessie C Stricchiola

Publisher:

O'Reilly Media

Released:

October 2009

ISBN:

978-0-596-51886-8

This page was last updated on Friday, 10th September 2010.