Very impressed by your multi-conditional PHP stuff, whatever that is !!

I just wrote a brief book review on our fave topic namely SEO, (that’s meant to be a joke), and while I’m waiting for it to be published here in Adelaide, I thought I’d flick it to you.

The author Rebecca Lieb is a skilled gal and excellent writer, and her book is “the bee’s knees”. So, how do you explain optimising sites for search engines to a general readership of a weekly print publication, in less than 300 words?

Hmmmm.

Anyway, tell me what you think, por favor – and I recommend this book for your reference shelf – the hard copy, printed, reference shelf.

OK?

Mig Zee
Adelaide, AUSTRALIA

Search engines & snake-oil

On one side of the computer screen are you and I, people using the web to find information, source products and consider service offerings.

On the other side of that screen are international businesses generating US$32 billion annually, with Google taking $21 billion of that digital marketing revenue in 2008.

Rebecca Lieb’s new book, The Truth About Search Engine Opimization (SEO), looks at the middle ground between us and the search engines. This is a valley inhabited by digital media agencies and their clients, web developers, producers of content and the inevitable snake-oil salespersons.

Lieb’s book is a well written, amusing and intelligent 200 page introduction to a universe where 50,000 people worldwide are employed to anticipate the one, two or three words we type into a search box – which we do daily at search engines, news sites, home pages, video-sharing portals and online sales operations.

So, who clicks where, why do we do it and what was in the results list that caught our attention?

On one side trying to influence our searching decisions are the snake-oil salespeople. These urgers make apparently compelling promises to website owners and business proprietors. “We’ll get you to page one in Google”, they claim, “maybe even the top spot”.

Lieb’s book is a welcome antidote to the chicanery of these “black hat” operators in the SEO game. She writes from an editorial and user perspective, suggesting that high quality content, good website architecture and ease of accessibility to a site’s offerings are the cornerstone of being found on the web.

And a site’s ability to be “well found” means we as searchers will be happy seekers, rather than frustrated searchers, seething at the screen and abandoning our search activity.

The Truth About Search Engine Optimization by Rebecca Lieb, published by Financial Times Press/Pearson, ISBN 978-0-7897-3831-8