Customer Reviews
Excellent!
My brother and I...both found this e-doc to be extremely valuable. You can spend [money] on books to help the search engines find your website, but read this short article and see if you don't agree that it performs a fantastic public service in summarizing the essence of what must be done to build your website traffic. Great job!
Don't waste your money
I totally agree with the other reviewer who advised not buying this document. First, it's only a few pages long, and certainly not worth paying money for. Second, the information is not anything special - it can be found on the web, where it belongs. It's merely a short article, and the first thing I've ever bought from Amazon that hasn't been worth the money. I am disappointed that Amazon would even decide to put such a short and 'thin' document on their website and sell it as a book. Can I get a refund?!
Watch out for dated information...
I'll laud the author for putting dates on his link references in the back of the ebook, but he really should use the "standards" for webpage references (yes, there is a standard!) The dates give me an idea when the information is culled. In this case, the information was culled from fall of 2002, and apparently included his attendance at a Search Engine Strategies conference.
I think for $7, if you are going no further, this ebook can provide you with some important and valuable information. Yes, you could find it on the web--but how much is your time worth? He gives some suggestions as to what to do and what not to do--and, by and large, those are good suggestions. As for length, a small business owner really doesn't want to or need to, wade through tons of information.
However, as his history of meta keywords indicates, the web changes fast. This ebook is now a year old. I did a project for my online internet fundamentals class (at Foothill College--foothill.edu) on increasing page ranking. (Wanna copy--email me at zapseo on yahoo.) 6 months ago, and I consider some of the information in that out-of-date--for instance, emphasis on Google, which, at the time, was responsible for 80% of web searches. However, things have changed. If my report of 6 mos ago is out of date, what about one written 12 mos ago?
You do have to watch out, because as the book implicitly indicates, what is today's method for achieving search engine ranking could get you banned tomorrow (yes, some search engines will not index some sites because of "spamdexing").
I'd have to go back and look, but I disagree with him on one important point: you cannot raise your google pagerank by internal linking. This was not what the results of my research showed.
I'm divided (as you can see by my rating) about this book. Good information...for now. But to keep up with the very dynamic world of web searching, the reader should not get comfortable. To get and maintain a decent search engine ranking takes ongoing work, and keeping up with changes in the web. Web ranking can change, dramatically, overnight (do a search on "google dance"). You are better off, imo, with having an ongoing relationship with a web professional (it will be worth it), just like you have one with your tax person. Let them keep up with the changes, and you, the small business owner, do what you are good at.
