SEO Made Simple: Strategies For Dominating The World’s Largest Search Engine

I think it’s time that someone gives this book something other than a five star review which, in my opinion, it doesn’t merit. Toward that end, here’s my take:

Judging from the content of the many laudatory reviews, this book’s primary audience is among people who are amateurs or noobies in the field of website design and functionality. If your experience in designing a webpage is limited to a WYSIWYG editor, if you don’t understand XHTML, you’re not sure what tag, element, attribute or “meta” mean, then this book is probably appropriate to your level of knowledge.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being inexperienced. Everybody has to start at the beginning. However, if you are an experienced website designer who, hopefully, hand-codes your pages in XHTML and CSS, makes an effort to comply with current standards for the separation of structure and presentation, and are making more than a formal bow to the need for accessibility, then there is likely to be little of interest to you in this book.

To be fair, there are certainly many good pieces of advice here, despite the author using the first 20% of the ~100 pages to toot his own horn. However, there is little information that could not be found by spending a couple of hours searching the internet for SEO topics; i.e., almost all of what the author “reveals” is rather common knowledge. Again, in the interest of fairness, the author readily admits that he is not a code expert. As a result, there are very few useful examples of actual HTML markup code. The snippets that do exist would be old news to a real developer but, occurring without the context of a real document, would be of little use to a novice designer.The glossary at the end of the book, which takes up about 10% of an already suspiciously short volume, is the last place I would turn for a cogent definition of many of the terms he includes; e.g., “Cascading style sheets (CSS) – used to manipulate and easily manage the design of a website.” Hmmm…perhaps that definition could be improved and expanded a bit for the next edition.

As an ex-professional printer (many years ago), I was disappointed with the design and typography of this book. Besides coming across with too much similarity to the “Get Rich Quick with Real Estate Foreclosures” and “Dr. X’s New Wonder Diet” genre, the book is poorly edited (too many typos) and composed in a sans-serif typeface (alright, I admit to being biased against that), making it difficult to read for long lengths of time. Also, many of the screen capture illustrations are so small that I needed a magnifying class to read them. I applaud the quite-readable choice of a large point-size for the body type, but that also helps pad out to about 100 sparse pages what should have probably been nothing more than a pamphlet half that size.

To his credit, the author seems to have adhered to the pre-eminent rule of the medical profession: “First of all, DO NO HARM!” His advice is all good, if not exhaustive, and there is certainly something here for any newcomer to website functionality. He also does a good job of steering the reader away from the “black hat” techniques that may have been effective in the not too distant past. Kudos to him for that. But, in contrast to the many other reviews declaring this book as the be-all and end-all of SEO advice, I beg to differ. There are other books on the subject as good, or better, than this one. Given the short length, the sub-standard physical design and production, the pretty well known nature of most of the advice given, I suggest it is over-priced; a price more like $7.95 would come closer to the real value of this tome.

However, if you are a noobie who is being pressured by some self-proclaimed SEO expert, who is promising to get you on Google’s first page for the mere sum of $695, then buying and reading this book at its current price may very well be a real money-saving bargain! Bottom-line: it’s not a BAD book; it’s just not that GOOD! Caveat emptor!

Rating: 3 / 5

If you want to be smart on SEO in very little time, this is the best buy for the buck. Good luck.
Rating: 5 / 5