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Are you suffering from a lack of Web-based visibility? Do you need to make it easier for people to find your website? And once they have found your website, do you know how to convert casual users into active users? The goal of SEO Warrior is to show you how to do these things and more through a collection of techniques, hacks, and best practices.
In SEO Warrior you will learn about Search Engine Marketing (SEM), social networking, and other techniques that will help you to create compelling websites that can stand the test of time. SEO Warrior is contained in 496 pages divided into 18 chapters.
Chapter One, "The Big Picture," examines what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is and what kind of benefits that you can expect from the proper implementation of SEO.
Chapter Two, "Search Engine Primer," gives you a view of the big picture of the search engine terrain and covers how it works including looking at the algorithms involved, Google Page Rank, as well as the search engine bots.
Chapter Three, "Website Essentials," now takes a look at options with the perspective of your website. This includes domain names, hosting options, software design, as well as providing the most fundamental building blocks for creating your online presence.
Chapter Four, "Internal Ranking Factors," are those things that you can control directly from within your site that can affect your rank in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). This details both page factors as well as site factors.
Chapter Five, "External Ranking Factors," are those things that do not depend on you directly, and in many cases things you have no control over. Covered here are external bound links, user behavior patterns, and how you are perceived by the outside world.
Chapter Six, "Web Stats Monitoring," examines different web monitoring tools. Analyzing your site stats is core to your SEO work and fully understanding your web stats can require many tools.
Chapter Seven, "Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics," is broken down into two parts. The first part looks at ways to track web page traffic, and the second looks at the preferred method for marketing and conversion.
Chapter Eight, "Search Engine Traps," explains how although search engines are getting better, it is not always good enough to index every bit of dynamic content and so this chapter will guide you through what you should and should not do to promote your site.
Chapter Nine, "Robots Exclusion Protocol," or REP, begins with the robots.txt protocol and provides a good foundation for ensuring proper crawling and indexing of your site.
Chapter Ten, "Sitemaps," is about indexes that help search engines navigate your site; this chapter explores how they work as well as looking at several different types.
Chapter 11, "Keyword Research," covers one of the most important aspects of SEO. This chapter discusses the basic strategy for using keywords and working with several tools that you can use to find them. Chapter 12, "Link Building," is all about building connections to your site so as to increase awareness along with attaining higher search engine rankings.
Chapter 13, "Competitor Research and Analysis," may seem like it's about copycatting, but rather it is about finding out what your competitors are doing to see if there is more you should be doing and using that information to try to overtake them within the search engines.
Chapter 14, "Content Consideration," discusses various concepts such as how to become a resource, how to work with short term content, long term content, as well as content duplication and content verticals.
Chapter 15, "Social Networking Phenomenon," looks at the importance of how to leverage the different social platforms and communities to promote and market your site.
Chapter 16, "Search Engine Marketing," shows you different ways to improve your SEO efforts through SEM. More specifically it will look at how to use Google AdWords to forecast your SEO. It also provides an overview the two most important Google platforms, that of AdWords and AdSence.
Chapter 17, "Search Engine Spam," describes when someone does something to boost page rank by pretending to have relevant content, when they are trying to promote something else entirely. When this happens, your site can be penalized.
Chapter 18, "Industry Buzz," finishes up by looking at the most talked about SEO topics at this time. These include Bing, SearchWiki, and the nofollow link attribute. At the end of the chapter the author provides a list of popular sites where you can keep up with the latest news as it relates to SEO.
I think that SEO Warrior does an excellent job of explaining what SEO is, how it works, and why it works. It also looks into some more advanced topics that make it one of the most valuable references that I have read.
While Google is a focus of this book, the main crux is how to get your site noticed by search engines. It breaks everything down from your domain, your ISP, what affects your rankings both internal as well as externally, but everything else that is involved in improving your site.
Some of SEO Warrior may be a bit more advanced for some readers as the author gets into scripts and advanced XML, but the rest, more than 75 percent, is completely accessible to anyone who wants to learn more about SEO and SEM. If you want one good solid reference that successfully presents and demonstrates how to get your website noticed, then I very highly recommend SEO Warrior.
