I’ve just finished “Get to the Top on Google – Tips and Techniques to Get Your Site to the Top of the Search Engine Rankings – and Stay There” by David Viney, ‘The SEO Expert’.
 
I thought I already had a fairly good idea of the kind of work involved in getting good search engine rankings, but I still devour books like this, hungry for new ideas and methods.  The book delivered validation of my current SEO activities, a few new ideas to try, and some different approaches to simple tasks, like naming pages and styling page titles more like breadcrumb trails than headlines.

David Viney certainly seems to know what he wants to achieve with this book. The title alone (as shown above) reads like an over-optimized landing page – and his methods must work, because if you type get to the top on Google into Google, the top result is a landing page which sells this very book, unsurprisingly.

Viney also heavily promotes his subscription-based SEO Expert Services website throughout the book. There’s a monthly fee for members, although purchase of this book gives you six months free. The coupon code required for this free period of membership can be found on page 3.

So the book is designed and written to make money through cross-selling and self-promotion – not that this is a bad thing – I mean, anyone reading a book like this is more than likely to be doing it because they want to make money online by promoting their website. But more important than this is the fact that the book gives very good advice to readers aspiring to be SEO experts.

Search Engine Optimization is a Seven Step Process

Viney’s SEO methods centre around a seven stage process which if followed in order, will deliver good results – assuming you’ve done everything correctly. The basic steps are:

1. Keyword research
   
2. Making your site easy for search engines to find
   
3. On-page search engine optimization
   
4. Building links
   
5. Paying for additional traffic
   
6. Optimizing a site for a geographical area
   
7. Analyzing website traffic and search engine results

The chapters are organized according to these steps and there are case studies and plently of links and pointers along the way (and we are often reminded that there are many more to be found on the SEO Expert Services forum).

Book Summary in a Sentence

If I were to summarize the basic message of the book in a single sentence, it would be as follows:

Once you’ve identified your broad subject, undertake exhaustive keyword research to identify your niche (using plural keywords wherever possible), use Google Webmaster Tools to submit a sitemap, write your page with easy navigation and your chosen keywords in mind, get as many links as possible leading to your site from websites with as high a PageRank as possible (being careful not to upset Google by buying links), and then analyze your results using Google Analytics, tweaking the site until your traffic ship comes in. 

For Search Engine Optimization beginners, this read will be fantastically useful. It gives information on everything from keyword research techniques to on-page optimization, how to find and solicit good quality links to your website, how to make your website appealing for search engine robots and much more.

What it doesn’t do (quite rightly) is tell you how to create the most important ingredient of all – good quality, original content. It suggests places to go to find articles which have been written for your chosen niche, or to find people to write on your behalf, but if someone is looking for a single magic answer to how to get to the top of Google, you won’t find it here. That’s because no such answer exists… not one that’s ethical, anyway.

There’s no single thing you can do to get your site great search engine rankings – no big green button to push. It’s all about hard work, time and effort. As Viney says, (in so many words), SEO is like throwing mud at a wall. The more you throw, the more will stick – so throw as much as possible.

Essentially, this means don’t pay too much attention to forums that say ‘the ALT tag is a waste of time’ or ‘the META keyword tag is now completely ignored’. Viney says pay attention to everything – because even if it’s a tiny part of the whole process, it’s another bit of mud to throw that just might stick.

For intermediate internet marketers, the book has a great deal of useful information, resources and a couple of eye-openers. Again, there’s nothing mystical about SEO – it’s mostly common sense. The reason most people fail is because it’s such hard work and so time consuming.

Conclusion

An easy-to-read book with a lot of useful information and resource links. Excellent for beginners, a useful reference for intermediates, but probably not too much new information for experts. When reading it, I felt almost as if I was chasing a golden goose through the pages as I turned them, only to find that it had never been there in the first place. But that’s not the fault of the book – that was just me being lazy. I want SEO to be easy; but it’s not.