Choosing a Good Book on SEO
November 15th, 2009
There are many books that try to teach us how to market our Websites. One has to ask how we’re supposed to know in advance which books are for real and which books are bogus. Can you judge a book by its cover or do you have to know something about a topic? Maybe the answer is that the best books will be recommended by experts in the field. You cannot judge a book by all the recommendations it gets because many people who know no better are wowed by presentation. The best information comes from experts whom other experts recommend.
Take search engine optimization. A lot of books have been written about search engine optimization. And it has often been said that as soon as you write a book about SEO it becomes obsolete because so much changes. Most SEO books tell you to use specific techniques and tools and that is why they become outdated and obsolete so quickly. SEO tools are notoriously unreliable sources of information. And SEO techniques, once they become popular, stop working as effective as they once did.
If you find an SEO theory book you need to look at the author’s credentials. Is it someone who is well-grounded in SEO theory? Is the author of the book someone whose name is strongly identified with the concepts of SEO theory? If not, then why would you want to read that SEO theory book, knowing the author was a nobody in the field of SEO theory?
Search engine optimization can be done as a paint-by-numbers art. In fact there are many people who treat it as cheap, commercial, formulaic art where they lay out all the “steps” you should take to build search engine success. But that doesn’t work for everyone. What you need to know is the science behind search engine optimization theory. Real SEO science doesn’t tell you to follow formulas, use SEO tools, or beat around the bush.
An honest SEO theory book explains the basic principles behind search engine optimization. A good SEO theory book looks at how the searchable Web works like an ecosystem and how that ecosystem functions. Learning search engine optimization the wrong way may help you a little bit but in the long run you want to learn the theory behind search engine optimization because it will help you overcome the setbacks that render most SEO books obsolete so quickly.
