To many abbreviations and rather dry, 27 Nov 2008
I think this is an OK but there are to many abbreviations of words and after reading half the book it becomes very dry and uninteresting.(paint drying moments)

I am sure this book would help you move up the google rankings, but from a programmers perspective I believe you can find all you want on googles website and related forums. Think I wasted my money here.

Cheers

What a good book, 05 Nov 2008
This is a really good book - informative and easy to follow and full of useful tips and know-how.

Welcome to the Magic Circle, 21 Jun 2008
Search Engine Optimisation has acquired a status which might be regarded similar to that of the magic circle:
It's secretive - only those in the circle really know the tricks
There's an element of magic - SEOs do things we don't understand
It's competitive - we all want to get to the top
It's closed - those within the circle do not disclose all the tricks
They even categorise their tricks as good and bad with the terms "white hat" and "black hat"

Well, in this excellent new book David Viney has let us all into the circle, and what we learn is that it's not magic!

However, I should like to follow that statement by immediately saying that it is plainly not easy either. Also, by the very nature of the fierce competition for the top spots, it will always be competitive, and you will always have to work at it.

What this particular magician sets out for us all here is a structure and a method which we might follow to improve our own success.

The author uses the analogy of cookery; there are ingredients, recipes to follow - and I would add, a great deal of time needed to be spent in the kitchen!!

You will be surprised to learn the breadth of things that you will need to do to be in with a competitive chance. The book covers the many factors that contribute to your ultimate success. I was surprised at just how many areas contribute to a site becoming successful, in 240 pages David Viney covers a lot of ground.

The title is so clever; Step 1 in David's plan focuses on finding the "phrases that pay", and sure enough, the title of his book is of course just one such example - nicely wraps-up in a phrase what the book is all about AND is what we are all searching for!

As other reviewers have written here, the book strikes an excellent balance in readability, suitable for reading and use by other professional SEOs and equally works very well for the novice.

The seven step procedure does categorise the areas of focus well, and does give a guide to chronology, but it's not his intention that you should remain in a step until you have done everything you possibly can, more that you need to do a wide number of things, and that over the longer period you will need to track back and forth through the steps and re-visit activities.

The book does a great job of illustrating the size of the market, the strength and importance of Google in that market, and the potential prizes available to the top of page one winners.

"Having your site in the top 10 is like having your store right on Main Street or near the entrance of the largest shopping mall in human history. Being outside the top 20 is like having a corner store on the very outskirts of town."

You should buy and read this book before building your website, probably even before naming you business. The tips within it on subjects such as targetting a niche, phrases that pay, finding and targeting keywords, domain names, hosting locations, etc. are all key considerations in the choices you should make in the very early days.

But there's no need to worry if you are already well into the life of your business and your website, there is plenty within this book for all to heed and follow.

I would strongly recommend the book to anybody interested in getting their website "to the top on Google", you will learn a great deal, and will be able to take action based upon the guidance within the book.

However, go into this exercise with the awareness that it is a long game. You may read the book in just a few hours, but you will need to work persistently at your website's optimisation continuously to reach the top and stay there .........The prizes are Great. It is fiercely competitive. The web is continuously evolving. Your competitors will read this book too.

This is probably the best book on this subject that you can buy.
Take the first step, buy and read the book.
Then keep it next to your computer, keep dipping into it, follow its recommendations.
Then, be prepared to buy an updated version or follow-up next year, with more and new recommendations for you to implement!

The Mother of all SEO Books, 16 Jun 2008
I want to keep this short and sweet as copywriting is not my strong point. If you are looking for a book that spells out the key issues on SEO in an order that actually makes logical sense - then this is the book for you. Rather than a book full of information (although it is very informative) - its best used a step-by-step tool to any SEO project. I can understand why one of the reviewers read it twice.

I had purchased SEO for Dummies but that was really a 'bits n pieces' kind of book and left me unguided. This book follows a chronological path and makes you stick to it.

I shall be using it on every SEO project from now on.

5/5

Buy IT! BUY IT!, 19 May 2008
I have read this book from cover to cover TWICE!!! Then I bought my collegue a copy for his birthday so he wouldn't keep taking mine!!
This is full of practical knowledge to get you up and going and also a great reference book for the more knowledgable. BUY IT NOW!!! You wont be dissapointed!!

To many abbreviations and rather dry, 27 Nov 2008
I think this is an OK but there are to many abbreviations of words and after reading half the book it becomes very dry and uninteresting.(paint drying moments)

I am sure this book would help you move up the google rankings, but from a programmers perspective I believe you can find all you want on googles website and related forums. Think I wasted my money here.

Cheers

What a good book, 05 Nov 2008
This is a really good book - informative and easy to follow and full of useful tips and know-how.

Welcome to the Magic Circle, 21 Jun 2008
Search Engine Optimisation has acquired a status which might be regarded similar to that of the magic circle:
It's secretive - only those in the circle really know the tricks
There's an element of magic - SEOs do things we don't understand
It's competitive - we all want to get to the top
It's closed - those within the circle do not disclose all the tricks
They even categorise their tricks as good and bad with the terms "white hat" and "black hat"

Well, in this excellent new book David Viney has let us all into the circle, and what we learn is that it's not magic!

However, I should like to follow that statement by immediately saying that it is plainly not easy either. Also, by the very nature of the fierce competition for the top spots, it will always be competitive, and you will always have to work at it.

What this particular magician sets out for us all here is a structure and a method which we might follow to improve our own success.

The author uses the analogy of cookery; there are ingredients, recipes to follow - and I would add, a great deal of time needed to be spent in the kitchen!!

You will be surprised to learn the breadth of things that you will need to do to be in with a competitive chance. The book covers the many factors that contribute to your ultimate success. I was surprised at just how many areas contribute to a site becoming successful, in 240 pages David Viney covers a lot of ground.

The title is so clever; Step 1 in David's plan focuses on finding the "phrases that pay", and sure enough, the title of his book is of course just one such example - nicely wraps-up in a phrase what the book is all about AND is what we are all searching for!

As other reviewers have written here, the book strikes an excellent balance in readability, suitable for reading and use by other professional SEOs and equally works very well for the novice.

The seven step procedure does categorise the areas of focus well, and does give a guide to chronology, but it's not his intention that you should remain in a step until you have done everything you possibly can, more that you need to do a wide number of things, and that over the longer period you will need to track back and forth through the steps and re-visit activities.

The book does a great job of illustrating the size of the market, the strength and importance of Google in that market, and the potential prizes available to the top of page one winners.

"Having your site in the top 10 is like having your store right on Main Street or near the entrance of the largest shopping mall in human history. Being outside the top 20 is like having a corner store on the very outskirts of town."

You should buy and read this book before building your website, probably even before naming you business. The tips within it on subjects such as targetting a niche, phrases that pay, finding and targeting keywords, domain names, hosting locations, etc. are all key considerations in the choices you should make in the very early days.

But there's no need to worry if you are already well into the life of your business and your website, there is plenty within this book for all to heed and follow.

I would strongly recommend the book to anybody interested in getting their website "to the top on Google", you will learn a great deal, and will be able to take action based upon the guidance within the book.

However, go into this exercise with the awareness that it is a long game. You may read the book in just a few hours, but you will need to work persistently at your website's optimisation continuously to reach the top and stay there .........The prizes are Great. It is fiercely competitive. The web is continuously evolving. Your competitors will read this book too.

This is probably the best book on this subject that you can buy.
Take the first step, buy and read the book.
Then keep it next to your computer, keep dipping into it, follow its recommendations.
Then, be prepared to buy an updated version or follow-up next year, with more and new recommendations for you to implement!

The Mother of all SEO Books, 16 Jun 2008
I want to keep this short and sweet as copywriting is not my strong point. If you are looking for a book that spells out the key issues on SEO in an order that actually makes logical sense - then this is the book for you. Rather than a book full of information (although it is very informative) - its best used a step-by-step tool to any SEO project. I can understand why one of the reviewers read it twice.

I had purchased SEO for Dummies but that was really a 'bits n pieces' kind of book and left me unguided. This book follows a chronological path and makes you stick to it.

I shall be using it on every SEO project from now on.

5/5

Buy IT! BUY IT!, 19 May 2008
I have read this book from cover to cover TWICE!!! Then I bought my collegue a copy for his birthday so he wouldn't keep taking mine!!
This is full of practical knowledge to get you up and going and also a great reference book for the more knowledgable. BUY IT NOW!!! You wont be dissapointed!!

Bedding Google Is A Good Idea!!, 20 Nov 2008
Get into bed with google is a really simple to read book that has really short chapters to digest the all important information and task of getting friendly with google, I highly recommend it from the author Jon Smith who displays a no nonsense approach to the aspects of search engine optimization and the rights and wrongs of how to get better results with Google and actually have them index your website.

If you follow the simple strategies and techniques offered in this handy pocket sized book, your website will be better equipped than most other websites and give you some definitive pointers to build and improve any website you create.

Great read and useful too.

Worth a Read, 20 Sep 2008
This book contains much good advice and tips on how to improve and optimise your website. I like the fact he recommends you steer clear of unethical approaches such as hidden text, and that you should stick to simple html with a lot of text-based content that can be easily read. The other big factor in this book is it's compact size and straightforward short chapters, meaning you can concentrate on implementing one recommendation at a time.

On the downside, some of the information is very outdated, considering the recent publication of the book itself. For starters, the Overture keyword search helper is overused and therefore very hard to even access nowadays, if at all, and is being phased out. Secondly, some of the items recommended such as Wordtracker are far from free and therefore only relevant for large businesses rather than the one-man band web developers likely to be attracted to a book like this.

All in all, 4 out of 5. Good and worth a read, you will most probably get your money back and more through increased exposure of your website using the suggestions within.

Clear, simple, and very quick to read, 19 Sep 2008
I've been building websites since 1994 and things have changed hugely since then - especially with the arrival of Google in the late '90s. This book presents 52 short and sweet tips for improving your ranking on search engines (not just on Google, though that's where the book places most of its emphasis).

It's a small book (about 6 inches by 4.5 inches) and a short one (just 174 pages of main content), but that's definitely a positive in my view. The advice is very distilled and easily readable. We cut straight to the chase. Each of the 52 general pointers concludes with "Here's an idea for you": a simple practical tip you can immediately try.

I knew almost all the tips already but hadn't bothered to do anything about them. The virtue of this book is that it served as a wake-up call to action. Reading through it in a couple of days, I finally felt motivated to optimize my site. I have no idea whether I'll see much benefit, but if you make a significant proportion of your income from the Web, it certainly can't hurt. Even a small improvement would pay for the cost of the book, and the time invested, many times over.

One thing worth pointing out: I felt the book was geared mainly towards websites selling products or promoting small businesses. Though much of the advice is general, the book doesn't really tell you how to optimize a content-rich, newspaper- or magazine-like site (or blog) that makes its money from advertising. That's probably a whole separate 52-idea book! If your site falls into that category (information-based rather than product-based), with dozens or hundreds of separate pages, you'll find the ideas here helpful but less relevant. If your site has just a few pages and it's promoting, say, a local florist or building business, I think you'll find it very helpful.

Simple and effective , 15 Sep 2008
This is a really easy book to use.
Yes, there are more complex books that go into SEO in greater depth than this but the fact is that if you have a small or medium size business employing less than 10 people, then the really advanced techniques aren't really for you anyway and are really not worth worrying about because you wont have time to implement them, even if you knwo about them.
For people like you, this book is probably all you will need -and it is all very clearly explained in non tecnhical jargon.
I even managed to read it on hols - yes, that's sad I know! But it lends itself to that kind of easy reading because it is explained so clearly in short bite size chunks that take all of about 10 minutes to read and digest.
OK, I found the odd thing listed as free (which now isnt) - and I see another reviewer noticed that too, but given the fast pace of chnage in this area, that cannot really be a serious criticism

Great little book that is not a drag to wade through, 10 Sep 2008
At last! A book that's good for me, but is easy to read and concise and gives me loads of tips every few pages that I immediately bookmark and want to implement. I'm getting teally tired of 'How-to' books that make you wade through several hundred pages of padding: this book is the antidote.

To many abbreviations and rather dry, 27 Nov 2008
I think this is an OK but there are to many abbreviations of words and after reading half the book it becomes very dry and uninteresting.(paint drying moments)

I am sure this book would help you move up the google rankings, but from a programmers perspective I believe you can find all you want on googles website and related forums. Think I wasted my money here.

Cheers

What a good book, 05 Nov 2008
This is a really good book - informative and easy to follow and full of useful tips and know-how.

Welcome to the Magic Circle, 21 Jun 2008
Search Engine Optimisation has acquired a status which might be regarded similar to that of the magic circle:
It's secretive - only those in the circle really know the tricks
There's an element of magic - SEOs do things we don't understand
It's competitive - we all want to get to the top
It's closed - those within the circle do not disclose all the tricks
They even categorise their tricks as good and bad with the terms "white hat" and "black hat"

Well, in this excellent new book David Viney has let us all into the circle, and what we learn is that it's not magic!

However, I should like to follow that statement by immediately saying that it is plainly not easy either. Also, by the very nature of the fierce competition for the top spots, it will always be competitive, and you will always have to work at it.

What this particular magician sets out for us all here is a structure and a method which we might follow to improve our own success.

The author uses the analogy of cookery; there are ingredients, recipes to follow - and I would add, a great deal of time needed to be spent in the kitchen!!

You will be surprised to learn the breadth of things that you will need to do to be in with a competitive chance. The book covers the many factors that contribute to your ultimate success. I was surprised at just how many areas contribute to a site becoming successful, in 240 pages David Viney covers a lot of ground.

The title is so clever; Step 1 in David's plan focuses on finding the "phrases that pay", and sure enough, the title of his book is of course just one such example - nicely wraps-up in a phrase what the book is all about AND is what we are all searching for!

As other reviewers have written here, the book strikes an excellent balance in readability, suitable for reading and use by other professional SEOs and equally works very well for the novice.

The seven step procedure does categorise the areas of focus well, and does give a guide to chronology, but it's not his intention that you should remain in a step until you have done everything you possibly can, more that you need to do a wide number of things, and that over the longer period you will need to track back and forth through the steps and re-visit activities.

The book does a great job of illustrating the size of the market, the strength and importance of Google in that market, and the potential prizes available to the top of page one winners.

"Having your site in the top 10 is like having your store right on Main Street or near the entrance of the largest shopping mall in human history. Being outside the top 20 is like having a corner store on the very outskirts of town."

You should buy and read this book before building your website, probably even before naming you business. The tips within it on subjects such as targetting a niche, phrases that pay, finding and targeting keywords, domain names, hosting locations, etc. are all key considerations in the choices you should make in the very early days.

But there's no need to worry if you are already well into the life of your business and your website, there is plenty within this book for all to heed and follow.

I would strongly recommend the book to anybody interested in getting their website "to the top on Google", you will learn a great deal, and will be able to take action based upon the guidance within the book.

However, go into this exercise with the awareness that it is a long game. You may read the book in just a few hours, but you will need to work persistently at your website's optimisation continuously to reach the top and stay there .........The prizes are Great. It is fiercely competitive. The web is continuously evolving. Your competitors will read this book too.

This is probably the best book on this subject that you can buy.
Take the first step, buy and read the book.
Then keep it next to your computer, keep dipping into it, follow its recommendations.
Then, be prepared to buy an updated version or follow-up next year, with more and new recommendations for you to implement!

The Mother of all SEO Books, 16 Jun 2008
I want to keep this short and sweet as copywriting is not my strong point. If you are looking for a book that spells out the key issues on SEO in an order that actually makes logical sense - then this is the book for you. Rather than a book full of information (although it is very informative) - its best used a step-by-step tool to any SEO project. I can understand why one of the reviewers read it twice.

I had purchased SEO for Dummies but that was really a 'bits n pieces' kind of book and left me unguided. This book follows a chronological path and makes you stick to it.

I shall be using it on every SEO project from now on.

5/5

Buy IT! BUY IT!, 19 May 2008
I have read this book from cover to cover TWICE!!! Then I bought my collegue a copy for his birthday so he wouldn't keep taking mine!!
This is full of practical knowledge to get you up and going and also a great reference book for the more knowledgable. BUY IT NOW!!! You wont be dissapointed!!

Bedding Google Is A Good Idea!!, 20 Nov 2008
Get into bed with google is a really simple to read book that has really short chapters to digest the all important information and task of getting friendly with google, I highly recommend it from the author Jon Smith who displays a no nonsense approach to the aspects of search engine optimization and the rights and wrongs of how to get better results with Google and actually have them index your website.

If you follow the simple strategies and techniques offered in this handy pocket sized book, your website will be better equipped than most other websites and give you some definitive pointers to build and improve any website you create.

Great read and useful too.

Worth a Read, 20 Sep 2008
This book contains much good advice and tips on how to improve and optimise your website. I like the fact he recommends you steer clear of unethical approaches such as hidden text, and that you should stick to simple html with a lot of text-based content that can be easily read. The other big factor in this book is it's compact size and straightforward short chapters, meaning you can concentrate on implementing one recommendation at a time.

On the downside, some of the information is very outdated, considering the recent publication of the book itself. For starters, the Overture keyword search helper is overused and therefore very hard to even access nowadays, if at all, and is being phased out. Secondly, some of the items recommended such as Wordtracker are far from free and therefore only relevant for large businesses rather than the one-man band web developers likely to be attracted to a book like this.

All in all, 4 out of 5. Good and worth a read, you will most probably get your money back and more through increased exposure of your website using the suggestions within.

Clear, simple, and very quick to read, 19 Sep 2008
I've been building websites since 1994 and things have changed hugely since then - especially with the arrival of Google in the late '90s. This book presents 52 short and sweet tips for improving your ranking on search engines (not just on Google, though that's where the book places most of its emphasis).

It's a small book (about 6 inches by 4.5 inches) and a short one (just 174 pages of main content), but that's definitely a positive in my view. The advice is very distilled and easily readable. We cut straight to the chase. Each of the 52 general pointers concludes with "Here's an idea for you": a simple practical tip you can immediately try.

I knew almost all the tips already but hadn't bothered to do anything about them. The virtue of this book is that it served as a wake-up call to action. Reading through it in a couple of days, I finally felt motivated to optimize my site. I have no idea whether I'll see much benefit, but if you make a significant proportion of your income from the Web, it certainly can't hurt. Even a small improvement would pay for the cost of the book, and the time invested, many times over.

One thing worth pointing out: I felt the book was geared mainly towards websites selling products or promoting small businesses. Though much of the advice is general, the book doesn't really tell you how to optimize a content-rich, newspaper- or magazine-like site (or blog) that makes its money from advertising. That's probably a whole separate 52-idea book! If your site falls into that category (information-based rather than product-based), with dozens or hundreds of separate pages, you'll find the ideas here helpful but less relevant. If your site has just a few pages and it's promoting, say, a local florist or building business, I think you'll find it very helpful.

Simple and effective , 15 Sep 2008
This is a really easy book to use.
Yes, there are more complex books that go into SEO in greater depth than this but the fact is that if you have a small or medium size business employing less than 10 people, then the really advanced techniques aren't really for you anyway and are really not worth worrying about because you wont have time to implement them, even if you knwo about them.
For people like you, this book is probably all you will need -and it is all very clearly explained in non tecnhical jargon.
I even managed to read it on hols - yes, that's sad I know! But it lends itself to that kind of easy reading because it is explained so clearly in short bite size chunks that take all of about 10 minutes to read and digest.
OK, I found the odd thing listed as free (which now isnt) - and I see another reviewer noticed that too, but given the fast pace of chnage in this area, that cannot really be a serious criticism

Great little book that is not a drag to wade through, 10 Sep 2008
At last! A book that's good for me, but is easy to read and concise and gives me loads of tips every few pages that I immediately bookmark and want to implement. I'm getting teally tired of 'How-to' books that make you wade through several hundred pages of padding: this book is the antidote.

A chatty introduction to the subject, 11 Oct 2008
I found this very disappointing. I guess it depends what your expectations are, and I didn't expect what this book delivered. It's chatty, anecdotal, long-winded and theoretical. It reads like the lecture notes for a basic class on information management for general students. I found it long on observation, short on analysis and entirely impractical.

This may be what you want, in which case go for it. It's not a bad book, but it's definitely one for the generalist. If you already know anything about classifying information then there'll be little in it that's new except for a few stories.

If you are new to the subject and have a train journey to occupy then go for it. If you want a how-to guide then you'd be much better off with Patrick Lambe's book: Organizing Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organization Effectiveness (Chandos Knowledge Management)

Lumpers are from Mars and Splitters are from Venus, 26 Jul 2008
If you don't know what a lumper is, or what a splitter is, you should read this book. In fact, you should read this book anyway - especially if you work in a place with a network drive, do any kind of filing, work with anybody who does any kind of filing.

I'm splitting too much. If you store information in any shape or form, then you should read this book. It's fairly obvious that the future will be full of information and data - this books about that and it's good.

If you like the sound of this, you might like Glut: The Deep History of Information Science: Mastering Information Through the Ages too.

What a book - it manages to make librarianship interesting!, 20 Jul 2008
So we have a book that is on the face of it about a very offputting subject - the labels that we put on things. But by the time you have finished reading this tour around the world as we live it - and as we are about to live it, we realise just how important those labels really are.

Have you ever thought about how a Staples organises itself? Have you ever thought about where we are going with all these data that we collect about the world? And have you ever wondered how a shopkeeper who owns a store that is apparently complete chaos has gone about sorting everything out?

The thing with David Weinberger is that he really knows how to write. These are well chosen examples that have you turning page after page and then thinking about what you have learned for months or even possibly years to come. Put simply, Weinberger knows how to write. One dreads to imagine how a book on this topic might have turned out under the pen of a less gifted author...

Let's just say that if you thought about reading The Long Tail, then you definitely should - but you should read Everything Is Miscellaneous first!

Great small work on information organisation, 15 May 2008
This book is really nice as a primer and fresh-up on how information is organized and what it means to us. It explains old organization methods, like the one the libraries use and the organization of organisms that was introduced by Linnaeus. It then compares those 'atom based' organization methods with the new ones we can perform with digital means. Of course Amazon is mentioned where everybody has basically his or her own version of a bookstore.

Worth reading if you are interested in taxonomies, ontologies, information organization and categorization.

Great book if you are interested in information, 09 Aug 2007
I got this book because I saw on a friend's blog she was reading it.
It is a great book and I have started citing things from it, for a while I was referring to it as the "book on tagging" but it is much more than that, it talks about the way information is organised and the problems such organisation brings with it.
The final words are:
"The world won't stay miscellaneous because we are together making it ours".
I have one gripe with the book it is written from an American point of view and assumes that the reader is also American. For example near the beginning it talks of "the Civil War", now lots of countries have had such strife, England had one back in the 1600s, Spain had one in the 1930s, and there are many others.
Not with standing that I do recommend reading it if you have any interest in information and how it is ordered.

To many abbreviations and rather dry, 27 Nov 2008
I think this is an OK but there are to many abbreviations of words and after reading half the book it becomes very dry and uninteresting.(paint drying moments)

I am sure this book would help you move up the google rankings, but from a programmers perspective I believe you can find all you want on googles website and related forums. Think I wasted my money here.

Cheers

What a good book, 05 Nov 2008
This is a really good book - informative and easy to follow and full of useful tips and know-how.

Welcome to the Magic Circle, 21 Jun 2008
Search Engine Optimisation has acquired a status which might be regarded similar to that of the magic circle:
It's secretive - only those in the circle really know the tricks
There's an element of magic - SEOs do things we don't understand
It's competitive - we all want to get to the top
It's closed - those within the circle do not disclose all the tricks
They even categorise their tricks as good and bad with the terms "white hat" and "black hat"

Well, in this excellent new book David Viney has let us all into the circle, and what we learn is that it's not magic!

However, I should like to follow that statement by immediately saying that it is plainly not easy either. Also, by the very nature of the fierce competition for the top spots, it will always be competitive, and you will always have to work at it.

What this particular magician sets out for us all here is a structure and a method which we might follow to improve our own success.

The author uses the analogy of cookery; there are ingredients, recipes to follow - and I would add, a great deal of time needed to be spent in the kitchen!!

You will be surprised to learn the breadth of things that you will need to do to be in with a competitive chance. The book covers the many factors that contribute to your ultimate success. I was surprised at just how many areas contribute to a site becoming successful, in 240 pages David Viney covers a lot of ground.

The title is so clever; Step 1 in David's plan focuses on finding the "phrases that pay", and sure enough, the title of his book is of course just one such example - nicely wraps-up in a phrase what the book is all about AND is what we are all searching for!

As other reviewers have written here, the book strikes an excellent balance in readability, suitable for reading and use by other professional SEOs and equally works very well for the novice.

The seven step procedure does categorise the areas of focus well, and does give a guide to chronology, but it's not his intention that you should remain in a step until you have done everything you possibly can, more that you need to do a wide number of things, and that over the longer period you will need to track back and forth through the steps and re-visit activities.

The book does a great job of illustrating the size of the market, the strength and importance of Google in that market, and the potential prizes available to the top of page one winners.

"Having your site in the top 10 is like having your store right on Main Street or near the entrance of the largest shopping mall in human history. Being outside the top 20 is like having a corner store on the very outskirts of town."

You should buy and read this book before building your website, probably even before naming you business. The tips within it on subjects such as targetting a niche, phrases that pay, finding and targeting keywords, domain names, hosting locations, etc. are all key considerations in the choices you should make in the very early days.

But there's no need to worry if you are already well into the life of your business and your website, there is plenty within this book for all to heed and follow.

I would strongly recommend the book to anybody interested in getting their website "to the top on Google", you will learn a great deal, and will be able to take action based upon the guidance within the book.

However, go into this exercise with the awareness that it is a long game. You may read the book in just a few hours, but you will need to work persistently at your website's optimisation continuously to reach the top and stay there .........The prizes are Great. It is fiercely competitive. The web is continuously evolving. Your competitors will read this book too.

This is probably the best book on this subject that you can buy.
Take the first step, buy and read the book.
Then keep it next to your computer, keep dipping into it, follow its recommendations.
Then, be prepared to buy an updated version or follow-up next year, with more and new recommendations for you to implement!

The Mother of all SEO Books, 16 Jun 2008
I want to keep this short and sweet as copywriting is not my strong point. If you are looking for a book that spells out the key issues on SEO in an order that actually makes logical sense - then this is the book for you. Rather than a book full of information (although it is very informative) - its best used a step-by-step tool to any SEO project. I can understand why one of the reviewers read it twice.

I had purchased SEO for Dummies but that was really a 'bits n pieces' kind of book and left me unguided. This book follows a chronological path and makes you stick to it.

I shall be using it on every SEO project from now on.

5/5

Buy IT! BUY IT!, 19 May 2008
I have read this book from cover to cover TWICE!!! Then I bought my collegue a copy for his birthday so he wouldn't keep taking mine!!
This is full of practical knowledge to get you up and going and also a great reference book for the more knowledgable. BUY IT NOW!!! You wont be dissapointed!!

Bedding Google Is A Good Idea!!, 20 Nov 2008
Get into bed with google is a really simple to read book that has really short chapters to digest the all important information and task of getting friendly with google, I highly recommend it from the author Jon Smith who displays a no nonsense approach to the aspects of search engine optimization and the rights and wrongs of how to get better results with Google and actually have them index your website.

If you follow the simple strategies and techniques offered in this handy pocket sized book, your website will be better equipped than most other websites and give you some definitive pointers to build and improve any website you create.

Great read and useful too.

Worth a Read, 20 Sep 2008
This book contains much good advice and tips on how to improve and optimise your website. I like the fact he recommends you steer clear of unethical approaches such as hidden text, and that you should stick to simple html with a lot of text-based content that can be easily read. The other big factor in this book is it's compact size and straightforward short chapters, meaning you can concentrate on implementing one recommendation at a time.

On the downside, some of the information is very outdated, considering the recent publication of the book itself. For starters, the Overture keyword search helper is overused and therefore very hard to even access nowadays, if at all, and is being phased out. Secondly, some of the items recommended such as Wordtracker are far from free and therefore only relevant for large businesses rather than the one-man band web developers likely to be attracted to a book like this.

All in all, 4 out of 5. Good and worth a read, you will most probably get your money back and more through increased exposure of your website using the suggestions within.

Clear, simple, and very quick to read, 19 Sep 2008
I've been building websites since 1994 and things have changed hugely since then - especially with the arrival of Google in the late '90s. This book presents 52 short and sweet tips for improving your ranking on search engines (not just on Google, though that's where the book places most of its emphasis).

It's a small book (about 6 inches by 4.5 inches) and a short one (just 174 pages of main content), but that's definitely a positive in my view. The advice is very distilled and easily readable. We cut straight to the chase. Each of the 52 general pointers concludes with "Here's an idea for you": a simple practical tip you can immediately try.

I knew almost all the tips already but hadn't bothered to do anything about them. The virtue of this book is that it served as a wake-up call to action. Reading through it in a couple of days, I finally felt motivated to optimize my site. I have no idea whether I'll see much benefit, but if you make a significant proportion of your income from the Web, it certainly can't hurt. Even a small improvement would pay for the cost of the book, and the time invested, many times over.

One thing worth pointing out: I felt the book was geared mainly towards websites selling products or promoting small businesses. Though much of the advice is general, the book doesn't really tell you how to optimize a content-rich, newspaper- or magazine-like site (or blog) that makes its money from advertising. That's probably a whole separate 52-idea book! If your site falls into that category (information-based rather than product-based), with dozens or hundreds of separate pages, you'll find the ideas here helpful but less relevant. If your site has just a few pages and it's promoting, say, a local florist or building business, I think you'll find it very helpful.

Simple and effective , 15 Sep 2008
This is a really easy book to use.
Yes, there are more complex books that go into SEO in greater depth than this but the fact is that if you have a small or medium size business employing less than 10 people, then the really advanced techniques aren't really for you anyway and are really not worth worrying about because you wont have time to implement them, even if you knwo about them.
For people like you, this book is probably all you will need -and it is all very clearly explained in non tecnhical jargon.
I even managed to read it on hols - yes, that's sad I know! But it lends itself to that kind of easy reading because it is explained so clearly in short bite size chunks that take all of about 10 minutes to read and digest.
OK, I found the odd thing listed as free (which now isnt) - and I see another reviewer noticed that too, but given the fast pace of chnage in this area, that cannot really be a serious criticism

Great little book that is not a drag to wade through, 10 Sep 2008
At last! A book that's good for me, but is easy to read and concise and gives me loads of tips every few pages that I immediately bookmark and want to implement. I'm getting teally tired of 'How-to' books that make you wade through several hundred pages of padding: this book is the antidote.

A chatty introduction to the subject, 11 Oct 2008
I found this very disappointing. I guess it depends what your expectations are, and I didn't expect what this book delivered. It's chatty, anecdotal, long-winded and theoretical. It reads like the lecture notes for a basic class on information management for general students. I found it long on observation, short on analysis and entirely impractical.

This may be what you want, in which case go for it. It's not a bad book, but it's definitely one for the generalist. If you already know anything about classifying information then there'll be little in it that's new except for a few stories.

If you are new to the subject and have a train journey to occupy then go for it. If you want a how-to guide then you'd be much better off with Patrick Lambe's book: Organizing Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organization Effectiveness (Chandos Knowledge Management)

Lumpers are from Mars and Splitters are from Venus, 26 Jul 2008
If you don't know what a lumper is, or what a splitter is, you should read this book. In fact, you should read this book anyway - especially if you work in a place with a network drive, do any kind of filing, work with anybody who does any kind of filing.

I'm splitting too much. If you store information in any shape or form, then you should read this book. It's fairly obvious that the future will be full of information and data - this books about that and it's good.

If you like the sound of this, you might like Glut: The Deep History of Information Science: Mastering Information Through the Ages too.

What a book - it manages to make librarianship interesting!, 20 Jul 2008
So we have a book that is on the face of it about a very offputting subject - the labels that we put on things. But by the time you have finished reading this tour around the world as we live it - and as we are about to live it, we realise just how important those labels really are.

Have you ever thought about how a Staples organises itself? Have you ever thought about where we are going with all these data that we collect about the world? And have you ever wondered how a shopkeeper who owns a store that is apparently complete chaos has gone about sorting everything out?

The thing with David Weinberger is that he really knows how to write. These are well chosen examples that have you turning page after page and then thinking about what you have learned for months or even possibly years to come. Put simply, Weinberger knows how to write. One dreads to imagine how a book on this topic might have turned out under the pen of a less gifted author...

Let's just say that if you thought about reading The Long Tail, then you definitely should - but you should read Everything Is Miscellaneous first!

Great small work on information organisation, 15 May 2008
This book is really nice as a primer and fresh-up on how information is organized and what it means to us. It explains old organization methods, like the one the libraries use and the organization of organisms that was introduced by Linnaeus. It then compares those 'atom based' organization methods with the new ones we can perform with digital means. Of course Amazon is mentioned where everybody has basically his or her own version of a bookstore.

Worth reading if you are interested in taxonomies, ontologies, information organization and categorization.

Great book if you are interested in information, 09 Aug 2007
I got this book because I saw on a friend's blog she was reading it.
It is a great book and I have started citing things from it, for a while I was referring to it as the "book on tagging" but it is much more than that, it talks about the way information is organised and the problems such organisation brings with it.
The final words are:
"The world won't stay miscellaneous because we are together making it ours".
I have one gripe with the book it is written from an American point of view and assumes that the reader is also American. For example near the beginning it talks of "the Civil War", now lots of countries have had such strife, England had one back in the 1600s, Spain had one in the 1930s, and there are many others.
Not with standing that I do recommend reading it if you have any interest in information and how it is ordered.


Its a starter on your International Strategy!, 23 Jan 2001
This book it's about the basics of International Marketing, the several stages covered with good examples that go along... It's the adapted book from many Business Schools, and a valuable guide to any professional. Issues go from Analysis, Development and Implementation.

To many abbreviations and rather dry, 27 Nov 2008
I think this is an OK but there are to many abbreviations of words and after reading half the book it becomes very dry and uninteresting.(paint drying moments)

I am sure this book would help you move up the google rankings, but from a programmers perspective I believe you can find all you want on googles website and related forums. Think I wasted my money here.

Cheers

What a good book, 05 Nov 2008
This is a really good book - informative and easy to follow and full of useful tips and know-how.

Welcome to the Magic Circle, 21 Jun 2008
Search Engine Optimisation has acquired a status which might be regarded similar to that of the magic circle:
It's secretive - only those in the circle really know the tricks
There's an element of magic - SEOs do things we don't understand
It's competitive - we all want to get to the top
It's closed - those within the circle do not disclose all the tricks
They even categorise their tricks as good and bad with the terms "white hat" and "black hat"

Well, in this excellent new book David Viney has let us all into the circle, and what we learn is that it's not magic!

However, I should like to follow that statement by immediately saying that it is plainly not easy either. Also, by the very nature of the fierce competition for the top spots, it will always be competitive, and you will always have to work at it.

What this particular magician sets out for us all here is a structure and a method which we might follow to improve our own success.

The author uses the analogy of cookery; there are ingredients, recipes to follow - and I would add, a great deal of time needed to be spent in the kitchen!!

You will be surprised to learn the breadth of things that you will need to do to be in with a competitive chance. The book covers the many factors that contribute to your ultimate success. I was surprised at just how many areas contribute to a site becoming successful, in 240 pages David Viney covers a lot of ground.

The title is so clever; Step 1 in David's plan focuses on finding the "phrases that pay", and sure enough, the title of his book is of course just one such example - nicely wraps-up in a phrase what the book is all about AND is what we are all searching for!

As other reviewers have written here, the book strikes an excellent balance in readability, suitable for reading and use by other professional SEOs and equally works very well for the novice.

The seven step procedure does categorise the areas of focus well, and does give a guide to chronology, but it's not his intention that you should remain in a step until you have done everything you possibly can, more that you need to do a wide number of things, and that over the longer period you will need to track back and forth through the steps and re-visit activities.

The book does a great job of illustrating the size of the market, the strength and importance of Google in that market, and the potential prizes available to the top of page one winners.

"Having your site in the top 10 is like having your store right on Main Street or near the entrance of the largest shopping mall in human history. Being outside the top 20 is like having a corner store on the very outskirts of town."

You should buy and read this book before building your website, probably even before naming you business. The tips within it on subjects such as targetting a niche, phrases that pay, finding and targeting keywords, domain names, hosting locations, etc. are all key considerations in the choices you should make in the very early days.

But there's no need to worry if you are already well into the life of your business and your website, there is plenty within this book for all to heed and follow.

I would strongly recommend the book to anybody interested in getting their website "to the top on Google", you will learn a great deal, and will be able to take action based upon the guidance within the book.

However, go into this exercise with the awareness that it is a long game. You may read the book in just a few hours, but you will need to work persistently at your website's optimisation continuously to reach the top and stay there .........The prizes are Great. It is fiercely competitive. The web is continuously evolving. Your competitors will read this book too.

This is probably the best book on this subject that you can buy.
Take the first step, buy and read the book.
Then keep it next to your computer, keep dipping into it, follow its recommendations.
Then, be prepared to buy an updated version or follow-up next year, with more and new recommendations for you to implement!

The Mother of all SEO Books, 16 Jun 2008
I want to keep this short and sweet as copywriting is not my strong point. If you are looking for a book that spells out the key issues on SEO in an order that actually makes logical sense - then this is the book for you. Rather than a book full of information (although it is very informative) - its best used a step-by-step tool to any SEO project. I can understand why one of the reviewers read it twice.

I had purchased SEO for Dummies but that was really a 'bits n pieces' kind of book and left me unguided. This book follows a chronological path and makes you stick to it.

I shall be using it on every SEO project from now on.

5/5

Buy IT! BUY IT!, 19 May 2008
I have read this book from cover to cover TWICE!!! Then I bought my collegue a copy for his birthday so he wouldn't keep taking mine!!
This is full of practical knowledge to get you up and going and also a great reference book for the more knowledgable. BUY IT NOW!!! You wont be dissapointed!!

Bedding Google Is A Good Idea!!, 20 Nov 2008
Get into bed with google is a really simple to read book that has really short chapters to digest the all important information and task of getting friendly with google, I highly recommend it from the author Jon Smith who displays a no nonsense approach to the aspects of search engine optimization and the rights and wrongs of how to get better results with Google and actually have them index your website.

If you follow the simple strategies and techniques offered in this handy pocket sized book, your website will be better equipped than most other websites and give you some definitive pointers to build and improve any website you create.

Great read and useful too.

Worth a Read, 20 Sep 2008
This book contains much good advice and tips on how to improve and optimise your website. I like the fact he recommends you steer clear of unethical approaches such as hidden text, and that you should stick to simple html with a lot of text-based content that can be easily read. The other big factor in this book is it's compact size and straightforward short chapters, meaning you can concentrate on implementing one recommendation at a time.

On the downside, some of the information is very outdated, considering the recent publication of the book itself. For starters, the Overture keyword search helper is overused and therefore very hard to even access nowadays, if at all, and is being phased out. Secondly, some of the items recommended such as Wordtracker are far from free and therefore only relevant for large businesses rather than the one-man band web developers likely to be attracted to a book like this.

All in all, 4 out of 5. Good and worth a read, you will most probably get your money back and more through increased exposure of your website using the suggestions within.

Clear, simple, and very quick to read, 19 Sep 2008
I've been building websites since 1994 and things have changed hugely since then - especially with the arrival of Google in the late '90s. This book presents 52 short and sweet tips for improving your ranking on search engines (not just on Google, though that's where the book places most of its emphasis).

It's a small book (about 6 inches by 4.5 inches) and a short one (just 174 pages of main content), but that's definitely a positive in my view. The advice is very distilled and easily readable. We cut straight to the chase. Each of the 52 general pointers concludes with "Here's an idea for you": a simple practical tip you can immediately try.

I knew almost all the tips already but hadn't bothered to do anything about them. The virtue of this book is that it served as a wake-up call to action. Reading through it in a couple of days, I finally felt motivated to optimize my site. I have no idea whether I'll see much benefit, but if you make a significant proportion of your income from the Web, it certainly can't hurt. Even a small improvement would pay for the cost of the book, and the time invested, many times over.

One thing worth pointing out: I felt the book was geared mainly towards websites selling products or promoting small businesses. Though much of the advice is general, the book doesn't really tell you how to optimize a content-rich, newspaper- or magazine-like site (or blog) that makes its money from advertising. That's probably a whole separate 52-idea book! If your site falls into that category (information-based rather than product-based), with dozens or hundreds of separate pages, you'll find the ideas here helpful but less relevant. If your site has just a few pages and it's promoting, say, a local florist or building business, I think you'll find it very helpful.

Simple and effective , 15 Sep 2008
This is a really easy book to use.
Yes, there are more complex books that go into SEO in greater depth than this but the fact is that if you have a small or medium size business employing less than 10 people, then the really advanced techniques aren't really for you anyway and are really not worth worrying about because you wont have time to implement them, even if you knwo about them.
For people like you, this book is probably all you will need -and it is all very clearly explained in non tecnhical jargon.
I even managed to read it on hols - yes, that's sad I know! But it lends itself to that kind of easy reading because it is explained so clearly in short bite size chunks that take all of about 10 minutes to read and digest.
OK, I found the odd thing listed as free (which now isnt) - and I see another reviewer noticed that too, but given the fast pace of chnage in this area, that cannot really be a serious criticism

Great little book that is not a drag to wade through, 10 Sep 2008
At last! A book that's good for me, but is easy to read and concise and gives me loads of tips every few pages that I immediately bookmark and want to implement. I'm getting teally tired of 'How-to' books that make you wade through several hundred pages of padding: this book is the antidote.

A chatty introduction to the subject, 11 Oct 2008
I found this very disappointing. I guess it depends what your expectations are, and I didn't expect what this book delivered. It's chatty, anecdotal, long-winded and theoretical. It reads like the lecture notes for a basic class on information management for general students. I found it long on observation, short on analysis and entirely impractical.

This may be what you want, in which case go for it. It's not a bad book, but it's definitely one for the generalist. If you already know anything about classifying information then there'll be little in it that's new except for a few stories.

If you are new to the subject and have a train journey to occupy then go for it. If you want a how-to guide then you'd be much better off with Patrick Lambe's book: Organizing Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organization Effectiveness (Chandos Knowledge Management)

Lumpers are from Mars and Splitters are from Venus, 26 Jul 2008
If you don't know what a lumper is, or what a splitter is, you should read this book. In fact, you should read this book anyway - especially if you work in a place with a network drive, do any kind of filing, work with anybody who does any kind of filing.

I'm splitting too much. If you store information in any shape or form, then you should read this book. It's fairly obvious that the future will be full of information and data - this books about that and it's good.

If you like the sound of this, you might like Glut: The Deep History of Information Science: Mastering Information Through the Ages too.

What a book - it manages to make librarianship interesting!, 20 Jul 2008
So we have a book that is on the face of it about a very offputting subject - the labels that we put on things. But by the time you have finished reading this tour around the world as we live it - and as we are about to live it, we realise just how important those labels really are.

Have you ever thought about how a Staples organises itself? Have you ever thought about where we are going with all these data that we collect about the world? And have you ever wondered how a shopkeeper who owns a store that is apparently complete chaos has gone about sorting everything out?

The thing with David Weinberger is that he really knows how to write. These are well chosen examples that have you turning page after page and then thinking about what you have learned for months or even possibly years to come. Put simply, Weinberger knows how to write. One dreads to imagine how a book on this topic might have turned out under the pen of a less gifted author...

Let's just say that if you thought about reading The Long Tail, then you definitely should - but you should read Everything Is Miscellaneous first!

Great small work on information organisation, 15 May 2008
This book is really nice as a primer and fresh-up on how information is organized and what it means to us. It explains old organization methods, like the one the libraries use and the organization of organisms that was introduced by Linnaeus. It then compares those 'atom based' organization methods with the new ones we can perform with digital means. Of course Amazon is mentioned where everybody has basically his or her own version of a bookstore.

Worth reading if you are interested in taxonomies, ontologies, information organization and categorization.

Great book if you are interested in information, 09 Aug 2007
I got this book because I saw on a friend's blog she was reading it.
It is a great book and I have started citing things from it, for a while I was referring to it as the "book on tagging" but it is much more than that, it talks about the way information is organised and the problems such organisation brings with it.
The final words are:
"The world won't stay miscellaneous because we are together making it ours".
I have one gripe with the book it is written from an American point of view and assumes that the reader is also American. For example near the beginning it talks of "the Civil War", now lots of countries have had such strife, England had one back in the 1600s, Spain had one in the 1930s, and there are many others.
Not with standing that I do recommend reading it if you have any interest in information and how it is ordered.


Its a starter on your International Strategy!, 23 Jan 2001
This book it's about the basics of International Marketing, the several stages covered with good examples that go along... It's the adapted book from many Business Schools, and a valuable guide to any professional. Issues go from Analysis, Development and Implementation.

IT Goverance and Open University InfoSec course (M886), 21 Sep 2004
Calder and Watkins considers, in an approachable way, the vulnerabilities that will be faced in for- and not-for-profit organisations at a level that is transferable: neither are they too specific in being technology biased, nor are they too generic at the level of vulnerability monitoring.

Moreover, Calder and Watkins has four other benefits:
* it neatly parallels the structure of the standard;
* each vulerability comes with detailed advice on how to implement a control to cover it;
* there is useful detail on vulnerabilities uncovered because of the use of the control; and, last bu not least,
* there are the trade-offs that arise between covering a vulnerability and leaving it uncovered.

These are very good reasons for studying the book and they're why we chose it as the basis for the Open University's new Information Security Management Course

Dr Jon G Hall, Lecturer in Information Security, Open University, UK

IT Goverance and Open University InfoSec course (M886), 16 Sep 2004
Calder and Watkins considers, in an approachable way, the vulnerabilities that will be faced in for- and not-for-profit organisations at a level that is transferable: neither are they too specific in being technology biased, nor are they too generic at the level of vulnerability monitoring.

Moreover, Calder and Watkins has four other benefits:
* it neatly parallels the structure of the standard;
* each vulerability comes with detailed advice on how to implement a control to cover it;
* there is useful detail on vulnerabilities uncovered because of the use of the control; and, last bu not least,
* there are the trade-offs that arise between covering a vulnerability and leaving it uncovered.

These are very good reasons for studying the book and they're why we chose it as the basis for the Open University's new Information Security Management Course

Dr Jon G Hall, Lecturer in Information Security, Open University, UK

To many abbreviations and rather dry, 27 Nov 2008
I think this is an OK but there are to many abbreviations of words and after reading half the book it becomes very dry and uninteresting.(paint drying moments)

I am sure this book would help you move up the google rankings, but from a programmers perspective I believe you can find all you want on googles website and related forums. Think I wasted my money here.

Cheers

What a good book, 05 Nov 2008
This is a really good book - informative and easy to follow and full of useful tips and know-how.

Welcome to the Magic Circle, 21 Jun 2008
Search Engine Optimisation has acquired a status which might be regarded similar to that of the magic circle:
It's secretive - only those in the circle really know the tricks
There's an element of magic - SEOs do things we don't understand
It's competitive - we all want to get to the top
It's closed - those within the circle do not disclose all the tricks
They even categorise their tricks as good and bad with the terms "white hat" and "black hat"

Well, in this excellent new book David Viney has let us all into the circle, and what we learn is that it's not magic!

However, I should like to follow that statement by immediately saying that it is plainly not easy either. Also, by the very nature of the fierce competition for the top spots, it will always be competitive, and you will always have to work at it.

What this particular magician sets out for us all here is a structure and a method which we might follow to improve our own success.

The author uses the analogy of cookery; there are ingredients, recipes to follow - and I would add, a great deal of time needed to be spent in the kitchen!!

You will be surprised to learn the breadth of things that you will need to do to be in with a competitive chance. The book covers the many factors that contribute to your ultimate success. I was surprised at just how many areas contribute to a site becoming successful, in 240 pages David Viney covers a lot of ground.

The title is so clever; Step 1 in David's plan focuses on finding the "phrases that pay", and sure enough, the title of his book is of course just one such example - nicely wraps-up in a phrase what the book is all about AND is what we are all searching for!

As other reviewers have written here, the book strikes an excellent balance in readability, suitable for reading and use by other professional SEOs and equally works very well for the novice.

The seven step procedure does categorise the areas of focus well, and does give a guide to chronology, but it's not his intention that you should remain in a step until you have done everything you possibly can, more that you need to do a wide number of things, and that over the longer period you will need to track back and forth through the steps and re-visit activities.

The book does a great job of illustrating the size of the market, the strength and importance of Google in that market, and the potential prizes available to the top of page one winners.

"Having your site in the top 10 is like having your store right on Main Street or near the entrance of the largest shopping mall in human history. Being outside the top 20 is like having a corner store on the very outskirts of town."

You should buy and read this book before building your website, probably even before naming you business. The tips within it on subjects such as targetting a niche, phrases that pay, finding and targeting keywords, domain names, hosting locations, etc. are all key considerations in the choices you should make in the very early days.

But there's no need to worry if you are already well into the life of your business and your website, there is plenty within this book for all to heed and follow.

I would strongly recommend the book to anybody interested in getting their website "to the top on Google", you will learn a great deal, and will be able to take action based upon the guidance within the book.

However, go into this exercise with the awareness that it is a long game. You may read the book in just a few hours, but you will need to work persistently at your website's optimisation continuously to reach the top and stay there .........The prizes are Great. It is fiercely competitive. The web is continuously evolving. Your competitors will read this book too.

This is probably the best book on this subject that you can buy.
Take the first step, buy and read the book.
Then keep it next to your computer, keep dipping into it, follow its recommendations.
Then, be prepared to buy an updated version or follow-up next year, with more and new recommendations for you to implement!

The Mother of all SEO Books, 16 Jun 2008
I want to keep this short and sweet as copywriting is not my strong point. If you are looking for a book that spells out the key issues on SEO in an order that actually makes logical sense - then this is the book for you. Rather than a book full of information (although it is very informative) - its best used a step-by-step tool to any SEO project. I can understand why one of the reviewers read it twice.

I had purchased SEO for Dummies but that was really a 'bits n pieces' kind of book and left me unguided. This book follows a chronological path and makes you stick to it.

I shall be using it on every SEO project from now on.

5/5

Buy IT! BUY IT!, 19 May 2008
I have read this book from cover to cover TWICE!!! Then I bought my collegue a copy for his birthday so he wouldn't keep taking mine!!
This is full of practical knowledge to get you up and going and also a great reference book for the more knowledgable. BUY IT NOW!!! You wont be dissapointed!!

Bedding Google Is A Good Idea!!, 20 Nov 2008
Get into bed with google is a really simple to read book that has really short chapters to digest the all important information and task of getting friendly with google, I highly recommend it from the author Jon Smith who displays a no nonsense approach to the aspects of search engine optimization and the rights and wrongs of how to get better results with Google and actually have them index your website.

If you follow the simple strategies and techniques offered in this handy pocket sized book, your website will be better equipped than most other websites and give you some definitive pointers to build and improve any website you create.

Great read and useful too.

Worth a Read, 20 Sep 2008
This book contains much good advice and tips on how to improve and optimise your website. I like the fact he recommends you steer clear of unethical approaches such as hidden text, and that you should stick to simple html with a lot of text-based content that can be easily read. The other big factor in this book is it's compact size and straightforward short chapters, meaning you can concentrate on implementing one recommendation at a time.

On the downside, some of the information is very outdated, considering the recent publication of the book itself. For starters, the Overture keyword search helper is overused and therefore very hard to even access nowadays, if at all, and is being phased out. Secondly, some of the items recommended such as Wordtracker are far from free and therefore only relevant for large businesses rather than the one-man band web developers likely to be attracted to a book like this.

All in all, 4 out of 5. Good and worth a read, you will most probably get your money back and more through increased exposure of your website using the suggestions within.

Clear, simple, and very quick to read, 19 Sep 2008
I've been building websites since 1994 and things have changed hugely since then - especially with the arrival of Google in the late '90s. This book presents 52 short and sweet tips for improving your ranking on search engines (not just on Google, though that's where the book places most of its emphasis).

It's a small book (about 6 inches by 4.5 inches) and a short one (just 174 pages of main content), but that's definitely a positive in my view. The advice is very distilled and easily readable. We cut straight to the chase. Each of the 52 general pointers concludes with "Here's an idea for you": a simple practical tip you can immediately try.

I knew almost all the tips already but hadn't bothered to do anything about them. The virtue of this book is that it served as a wake-up call to action. Reading through it in a couple of days, I finally felt motivated to optimize my site. I have no idea whether I'll see much benefit, but if you make a significant proportion of your income from the Web, it certainly can't hurt. Even a small improvement would pay for the cost of the book, and the time invested, many times over.

One thing worth pointing out: I felt the book was geared mainly towards websites selling products or promoting small businesses. Though much of the advice is general, the book doesn't really tell you how to optimize a content-rich, newspaper- or magazine-like site (or blog) that makes its money from advertising. That's probably a whole separate 52-idea book! If your site falls into that category (information-based rather than product-based), with dozens or hundreds of separate pages, you'll find the ideas here helpful but less relevant. If your site has just a few pages and it's promoting, say, a local florist or building business, I think you'll find it very helpful.

Simple and effective , 15 Sep 2008
This is a really easy book to use.
Yes, there are more complex books that go into SEO in greater depth than this but the fact is that if you have a small or medium size business employing less than 10 people, then the really advanced techniques aren't really for you anyway and are really not worth worrying about because you wont have time to implement them, even if you knwo about them.
For people like you, this book is probably all you will need -and it is all very clearly explained in non tecnhical jargon.
I even managed to read it on hols - yes, that's sad I know! But it lends itself to that kind of easy reading because it is explained so clearly in short bite size chunks that take all of about 10 minutes to read and digest.
OK, I found the odd thing listed as free (which now isnt) - and I see another reviewer noticed that too, but given the fast pace of chnage in this area, that cannot really be a serious criticism

Great little book that is not a drag to wade through, 10 Sep 2008
At last! A book that's good for me, but is easy to read and concise and gives me loads of tips every few pages that I immediately bookmark and want to implement. I'm getting teally tired of 'How-to' books that make you wade through several hundred pages of padding: this book is the antidote.

A chatty introduction to the subject, 11 Oct 2008
I found this very disappointing. I guess it depends what your expectations are, and I didn't expect what this book delivered. It's chatty, anecdotal, long-winded and theoretical. It reads like the lecture notes for a basic class on information management for general students. I found it long on observation, short on analysis and entirely impractical.

This may be what you want, in which case go for it. It's not a bad book, but it's definitely one for the generalist. If you already know anything about classifying information then there'll be little in it that's new except for a few stories.

If you are new to the subject and have a train journey to occupy then go for it. If you want a how-to guide then you'd be much better off with Patrick Lambe's book: Organizing Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organization Effectiveness (Chandos Knowledge Management)

Lumpers are from Mars and Splitters are from Venus, 26 Jul 2008
If you don't know what a lumper is, or what a splitter is, you should read this book. In fact, you should read this book anyway - especially if you work in a place with a network drive, do any kind of filing, work with anybody who does any kind of filing.

I'm splitting too much. If you store information in any shape or form, then you should read this book. It's fairly obvious that the future will be full of information and data - this books about that and it's good.

If you like the sound of this, you might like Glut: The Deep History of Information Science: Mastering Information Through the Ages too.

What a book - it manages to make librarianship interesting!, 20 Jul 2008
So we have a book that is on the face of it about a very offputting subject - the labels that we put on things. But by the time you have finished reading this tour around the world as we live it - and as we are about to live it, we realise just how important those labels really are.

Have you ever thought about how a Staples organises itself? Have you ever thought about where we are going with all these data that we collect about the world? And have you ever wondered how a shopkeeper who owns a store that is apparently complete chaos has gone about sorting everything out?

The thing with David Weinberger is that he really knows how to write. These are well chosen examples that have you turning page after page and then thinking about what you have learned for months or even possibly years to come. Put simply, Weinberger knows how to write. One dreads to imagine how a book on this topic might have turned out under the pen of a less gifted author...

Let's just say that if you thought about reading The Long Tail, then you definitely should - but you should read Everything Is Miscellaneous first!

Great small work on information organisation, 15 May 2008
This book is really nice as a primer and fresh-up on how information is organized and what it means to us. It explains old organization methods, like the one the libraries use and the organization of organisms that was introduced by Linnaeus. It then compares those 'atom based' organization methods with the new ones we can perform with digital means. Of course Amazon is mentioned where everybody has basically his or her own version of a bookstore.

Worth reading if you are interested in taxonomies, ontologies, information organization and categorization.

Great book if you are interested in information, 09 Aug 2007
I got this book because I saw on a friend's blog she was reading it.
It is a great book and I have started citing things from it, for a while I was referring to it as the "book on tagging" but it is much more than that, it talks about the way information is organised and the problems such organisation brings with it.
The final words are:
"The world won't stay miscellaneous because we are together making it ours".
I have one gripe with the book it is written from an American point of view and assumes that the reader is also American. For example near the beginning it talks of "the Civil War", now lots of countries have had such strife, England had one back in the 1600s, Spain had one in the 1930s, and there are many others.
Not with standing that I do recommend reading it if you have any interest in information and how it is ordered.


Its a starter on your International Strategy!, 23 Jan 2001
This book it's about the basics of International Marketing, the several stages covered with good examples that go along... It's the adapted book from many Business Schools, and a valuable guide to any professional. Issues go from Analysis, Development and Implementation.

IT Goverance and Open University InfoSec course (M886), 21 Sep 2004
Calder and Watkins considers, in an approachable way, the vulnerabilities that will be faced in for- and not-for-profit organisations at a level that is transferable: neither are they too specific in being technology biased, nor are they too generic at the level of vulnerability monitoring.

Moreover, Calder and Watkins has four other benefits:
* it neatly parallels the structure of the standard;
* each vulerability comes with detailed advice on how to implement a control to cover it;
* there is useful detail on vulnerabilities uncovered because of the use of the control; and, last bu not least,
* there are the trade-offs that arise between covering a vulnerability and leaving it uncovered.

These are very good reasons for studying the book and they're why we chose it as the basis for the Open University's new Information Security Management Course

Dr Jon G Hall, Lecturer in Information Security, Open University, UK

IT Goverance and Open University InfoSec course (M886), 16 Sep 2004
Calder and Watkins considers, in an approachable way, the vulnerabilities that will be faced in for- and not-for-profit organisations at a level that is transferable: neither are they too specific in being technology biased, nor are they too generic at the level of vulnerability monitoring.

Moreover, Calder and Watkins has four other benefits:
* it neatly parallels the structure of the standard;
* each vulerability comes with detailed advice on how to implement a control to cover it;
* there is useful detail on vulnerabilities uncovered because of the use of the control; and, last bu not least,
* there are the trade-offs that arise between covering a vulnerability and leaving it uncovered.

These are very good reasons for studying the book and they're why we chose it as the basis for the Open University's new Information Security Management Course

Dr Jon G Hall, Lecturer in Information Security, Open University, UK

great but to be updated!, 29 Apr 2008
A great book and clearly a reference on the subject but this book would clearly deserve an update...IT is not exactly a static subject and 2004 was...well...4 years ago!

Mohammad al-Ammar, 15 Sep 2004
This book is the greatest of its kind in IT law. It combines technical and legal issues with interesting facts about IT and information gateway. I highly recommend this book for every student and researcher. Plus, it is very organized in its structure. This book goes through different topics: privacy, data protection, computer crimes, IP law, contractual and tort liability related to software, tax and the Internet, cryptography, and defamation. It covers these subjects from American and European prospectives.

Clear , concise and very useful, 27 Nov 2001
I've found this book to be well laid out, easy to read and useful for an LLM in information technology law. Extensive use of internet links makes it easy to find additional reading.
Makes a useful primer, but it is not short on details either.
if you are interested in this field, also look at Law and the Internet by Edwards and Waelde.

A must for Information Technology lawyers., 30 Oct 2000
As an L.S.E. student, doing my LLM I have found this book invaluable. It really is precise, clear and goes to the point in the first pages. Lloyd knows what he is talking about. No nonsense in this book you will find.