I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve finished a book and then went right back and read the whole thing over again. This is one of those times! Web Traffic Magnet was too valuable to only read once. I’ve begun to put into action the instructions from this book and I am already starting to see the results. I run a question and answer forum about cities and neighborhoods and I am now seeing some of my questions show up on page one of Google search results! The book is very user friendly and easy to understand. I loved it and highly recommend it if you are looking for an understandable way to learn how to drive traffic to your website.

Every professional web developer at some point of time has to confront the ruthless reality – SEO. There are variety of reasons of why it is happening but the most common one is that customers don’t just need greatly functional websites; they need greatly findable (“spiderable” is industry term) websites along with great functionality.

So whoever hoped to stick to cozy world of coding are pushed out from zone of comfort. SEO can be interesting, even exciting sometimes, but never cozy. It is like Wild West of the olden days with sheriffs (Google, Bing etc), bandits (spammers, phishers etc) and constant gold rush to get your site at the very top of the very first search results page.

To navigate well and, most importantly, satisfy your customers with sensible SEO results a web developer have to peruse astronomical amount of information, chaotically scattered across endless cyberspace. This book is a good, if not perfect, starting point to begin SEO experience.

Although sample code is in C#, it is simple enough to be understood by VB.NET developers. There is a good coverage on URL Rewriters, topic is not widely known but relatively easy to manage for anybody who worked a little bit with Regular Expressions. Chapter on Black Hat SEO is also quite useful, especially for those who involved in development of blogs. Pretty much all major parameters for proper SEO can be found in the books but they could be structured better – I had to develop my own checklist. Importance of 301 Redirection is stressed out quite well.

Something can be highlighted better, namely issues related to shared hosting. It is a topic on its own and there are some problems with that that can not be solved easily.

By the way authors are quite helpful and willing to assist if something is not entirely transparent with the code supplied with the book. Code can be downloaded from WROX website; it is OK for most part, with occasional not too severe flaws.

SEO can be pretty scary at the very beginning. That should be seen in positive light though. It may sound ridiculous but SEOing does improve mental resilience in dealing with vast quantities of loosely related data. Having this book in your arsenal can make that trait even better.

[...]

Ok, so this is the second book I’ve got from Wrox for reviewing (and yes, I did enjoy it much more than the first). SEO is one of those things that most developers end up forgetting when building ASP.NET pages Unfortunately, that might cost you a lot. This books presents several principles and ideas that will help you improve your site’s indexing. The structure is clean and the content is good.

Now, the bad things: I didn’t really liked the C# code style presented throughout the book and I think that some of the ideas were “duplicated” in several chapters. The text gives lots of emphasis on Google (which one can understand, since it rules the search engine market). I’m not against it but I’d like to see more about the other search engines too. Overall, I’m going to give it a 7.5/10.

This book is very valuable for Drupal developers and Drupal shops … but maybe even more so for the do-it-yourself / individual Drupal site owner. It takes the basic premise of open source and adds the ability for anyone with a Drupal site to do some very effective search engine optimization. You don’t need to be a programmer or SEO specialist to follow the steps outlined in the book and get results. It’s very easy to understand and implement.

My advice: set up a Google Analytics account (if you haven’t already). Then buy this book and use it, and track the results over the following months. You’ll likely be as happy as I am.

Creating a website, even with a great looking initial landing page, is not nearly enough in today’s increasingly competitive marketplace. Tim Ash’s book is a simple, practical step-by-step guide to effectively win your target customers’ attention, their purchases and, ultimately, their loyalty. A “must read” for anyone with an Internet presence.

OMG this has not only the commonsense you expect to find. But what I really love about it is the practical and specific DRUPAL instructions.

Thank you Ben!

Most websites are developed without SEO in mind. They are often developed by teams that have a very deep knowledge and understanding about programming websites and applications, databases and also general business and e-commerce. A large (if not the most) number of those teams only have little or no knowledge of SEO at all. The result is a website that might violates some of the very basic rules of creating a site that is well accessible and understandable for the human visitors as well as the non-human visitors (the search engine spiders or crawlers).

Changing a site after it is live and around for a while, when somebody realizes that search engine traffic is not the way it should be, can be very costly and in the worst cases may be even require an almost entire rewrite of the website code.

That’s why is it important that not only marketers are being educated about the benefits and principles of search engine optimization, but the people that build websites as well. Who builds websites? Web developers. This book was written exactly for this audience, but also a SEO who knows most of the information to SEO provided in the book could benefit from this book. It includes a lot of very practical .NET sample source code for ready to use tools that can help marketers in their daily routine.

Although a lot of the content is not .NET specific are other parts that are using a lot of sample source code to demonstrate possible solutions, specific for Microsoft IIS and the .NET Framework. If you are a PHP developer, check out the sister book of this one (Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO), which is geared towards PHP, Apache Webserver and MySQL web developers.

Could a book that would obviously be about grabbing a web surfer’s attention for commercial purposes be helpful to someone who wasn’t particularly concerned about `conversions’? In this case, absolutely yes. If you can allow your mind to think outside the box just a bit, this book can really provide some helpful advice which can be easily translated to your particular goal.

Mr. Ash assumes you know what you want to do but nevertheless gently nudges you with reminders of the many things which you should be considering. Complex – but necessary – concepts are explained in context and without boring definitions so that you can smile smugly with the sure and steadfast knowledge that you’ve always understood things like Full Factorial Non-Parametric Testing. After a few pages, you’ll be eager to make meaningful changes to your own website!

Having your own website is one thing. Driving traffic to it is another! Whether you’re the top-flight director of a serious multi-national, a partner in a medium sized business with a 6-figure turnover, or a sole trader struggling to sell a few fishing rods to pay the rent then “12 Habits” will help you grow your business. And you won’t need a Masters in Computer Science to understand the content. The author lucidly, succinctly and intelligently explains some straightforward yet effective changes you can apply to send your website’s visitor-count soaring!

There’s a phrase “all professions are a conspiracy against the laity”. Most IT books are riddled with technical jargon and industry acronyms; in short they’re authored BY geeks and FOR geeks! “12 Habits” is a breath of fresh air. The use of simple illustrations from everyday life is especially helpful. Busy executives don’t have the time to wade through hundreds of pages of jargon. We’ve businesses to run and high-level decisions to make. This book taught me the significance of the “Google Golden Triangle”, the importance of “Tag Lines”, the relevance of my website’s “Page Rank” relative to those of my competitors, and much else besides.

It’s an outstanding publication stuffed with practical, easy-to-understand hints on optimising your web presence; And theres no arguing with the price of $12 – that’s a dollar a habit! Buy it, read it, have your IT technical team apply the changes, then watch your sales go through the roof. I did.