Book Review: Search Engine Visibility

Search Engine Visibility
by Shari Thurow (New Riders, 2003)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a field that is plagued with folk-remedy techniques, spam, fraud, and misinformation. Thankfully, this book avoids these pitfalls and discusses sensible, white-hat techniques for creating a site optimized for both readers and search engines.

The Audience

In the introduction, the author calls this book "a guide to help web designers, web developers, programmers, ad agencies, web design firms, online marketers, copywriters, and anyone who builds web sites." As you might expect from a target audience that diverse, this book focuses more on theory and technique than on code.

This isn't a bad thing—a book that focused on specific code, or on what works or doesn't work on a specific search engine, wouldn't take long to become obsolete. But more advanced designers and programmers may find lots of material to skip in the early chapters.

There's also a certain emphasis on marketing—not surprising, considering that companies with something to sell are far more likely to be concerned with their search engine rankings—but those who run simple content sites will still find some value here.

The Content

Here's a brief look at what each chapter of this book offers:

• Part I, Before You Build introduces the different types of search engines—and here the author includes directories like Yahoo as well. The last part of this chapter is a crash course on good Web design practices—easy-to-read content, navigation, consistent layout, and so on. It's basic but spot-on.
• Part II, How to Build Better Web Pages focuses on three critical areas for search-engine-optimized sites - good text, links, both external and internal, and popularity. If you know nothing about SEO, this is a good introduction.
• Part III, Page Design Workarounds discusses some specific web technologies—JavaScript, CSS, frames, Flash, server-side language sand SSI, and PDF—and how they can help or hinder search engines. There's quite a bit of depth to the coverage and several code examples.
• Part IV, After Your Site Is Built covers promoting a site with directory submissions, search engine submissions, monitoring statistics, and site maintenance. Detailed checklists in the submission sections provide a nice summary of the content.
• Part V, Best Practices: The Dos and Don'ts of Search Engine Marketing gets into the Dark Side of SEO, with discussions of spamming, cloaking, doorway pages, and so on. The emphasis is on why these techniques are bad ideas and not likely to work the way you expect. The final section debunks some of the common misconceptions that abound in SEO.
• The Appendix contains a good list of books and Web resources for further information, a decent glossary, and an excerpt from a book on speeding up web pages.

Conclusion

Overall, I found this book a good introduction to search engine optimization, and one of the most down-to-earth sources in the field. While the author's marketing background is apparent in some of the language—terms like synergy and utilize are peppered throughout—it was nonetheless very readable.

While an experienced web designer could likely find all of the vital information about SEO online, it can be hard to tell what is good information and what is wrong—and following the wrong advice can get you banned by search engines. This book gathers all the vital techniques into a nice package and stays nicely grounded in reality and common sense.

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