The SEO Expert Guide: How to Get to the Top of the Search Engine Rankings and Stay There

For many small and medium sized businesses, the internet remains a relatively unexploited area for sales. Larger companies, by contrast, are achieving sales of 20-60 per cent via the web. There are exceptions. The Teddington Cheese, for example, is a small business in the UK that sells British and European cheeses across the globe and was a winner of the UK eCommerce Awards in 1999. Who would have thought that cheese was a winner online? Well, Teddington Cheese did and have been reaping the rewards ever since! Search engine rankings are absolutely key to success (with most small webmasters getting almost 90 per cent of their traffic this way). In this concise and easy-to-access guide, you can discover: how search engines work, how to work out the best keywords for what you are selling, how to optimize your page URLs, how to optimise your metadata and page text, how to promote your site with free and paid advertising, how to avoid banned techniques, and how to monitor your ongoing success. The book is packed full of tools and techniques from across the web and uses the simple case study of an antique hardware business to walk your through the dark art of SEO step-by-step.

Table of Contents:
The SEO Expert Guide Search Engines Explained What are they and who powers them? How do Engines find and rank sites? Which Engines are the most popular? Proposition Development What are you selling? Who are your audience? Where are your competitors? Keyword Analysis What are your 10 key words? Which words do your competitors use? Identifying related keywords Building key word chains Sitewide Optimization Domain name Optimization URL name Optimization File extension Optimization Internal Links and Site Map Optimization Page Optimization Metadata Optimization Title and Heading Optimization Page Structure Optimization Page Text Optimization Page Image Optimization Free Site Promotion (PR) Google PageRank Inbound links Directory Submission Search Engine Submission Forum Participation Article Submission Newsletters and eZines Blogs and RSS Outbound Links Favourites, Feedback and Referral Paid Site Promotion (Marketing) Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising Paid Directory Submission Express Search Engine Submission Black Hat SEO - Activities to avoid Search Engine Ethics Hidden Page Text Buying Inbound Links Use of Link Farms and IBLNs Use of Cloaking Pages or Sneaky Redirects Ongoing Monitoring of Results Tracking PageRank (PR) Key Word Performance Reporting Monitoring your Traffic Rank Checking your Back Links Interpreting your own Web Statistics Conclusions The cost/value trade-off Your top 5 priorities Some notes on Migration Some final words Appendix A: SEO Resources & Tools Appendix B: SEO Forums & Newsletters

About the Author :
David Viney is passionate about the role of technology as a competitive weapon in the 21st Century business. He takes every opportunity to promote IT as a profession and to raise awareness of its value, including presentations to Cranfield and London Business Schools, the British Computer Society and eBusiness and IT Industry events across the UK and Continental Europe. As an eBusiness specialist, David has initiated and steered multi-million pound intranet projects at two of the UK's biggest companies; British Airways and Centrica and played a leading role in the relaunch of the AA's website in 2001. He is a Looksmart zealot with 10 years of experience in web site design and management.