SEO Warrior

How This Book Is Organized

SEO Warrior takes a holistic approach when it comes to SEO. The book comprises 18 chapters. Here is a rundown of what you’ll find in each:

Chapter 1, The Big Picture

Examines the various parts of the SEO landscape, including SEO benefits and challenges. It also stresses the importance of formalizing the entire SEO process in a way that will help you track your SEO progress.

Chapter 2, Search Engine Primer

Provides an overview of the search engine landscape. It covers the most important search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and Bing) while observing some of the lesser-known alternatives. It also examines search engine algorithms, including Google PageRank, as well as search engine bots.

Chapter 3, Website Essentials

Examines domain name and hosting options, custom software design, and third-party software, along with website usability and web accessibility. This chapter provides the most fundamental building blocks for creating your online presence as well as the underlying infrastructure in an SEO sense.

Chapter 4, Internal Ranking Factors, and Chapter 5, External Ranking Factors

Cover the various SEO factors that influence a site’s rankings. Instead of just stating what those factors are, I actually prove them. The proof comes in the form of a Perl script that is available in Appendix A as well as on the book’s companion website, http://www.seowarrior.net.

Chapter 6, Web Stats Monitoring

Examines different web stats monitoring tools, including the most popular ones used by shared hosting providers. It also examines the NCSA Common log format in detail. Understanding what goes into web logs is important for you to gauge your website traffic, no matter what tool you use.

Chapter 7, Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics

Goes into detail regarding these two platforms. Both tools are helpful in SEO. The bottom line is that you will need to use several tools to ensure proper tracking and monitoring.

Chapter 8, Search Engine Traps

Examines the kinds of scenarios that will prevent your site from being crawled. It examines each scenario in detail, with many code examples.

Chapter 9, Robots Exclusion Protocol

Discusses Robots Exclusion Protocol in detail. Coverage includes robots.txt and its associated directives, HTML meta directives, the .htaccess access control method, and the HTTP Header X-Robot-Tag(s). This chapter provides a solid foundation in terms of ensuring proper crawling and indexing of your site.

Chapter 10, Sitemaps

Highlights the benefits of Sitemaps. Google and others encourage site owners to create Sitemaps to help them index their sites. The chapter explores the creation of several different Sitemap types, including plain-text URL listings, HTML, XML, RSS/Atom, video, and mobile Sitemaps.

Chapter 11, Keyword Research

Covers one of the most important activities in SEO: keyword research. The chapter discusses ways to find keywords, a basic strategy and process, and timing and trending factors. It also covers several tools and how you can use them to find keywords.

Chapter 12, Link Building

Goes over the different link-building strategies you should use. Link building is one of the most important activities in SEO. The chapter discusses the topics of link bait, social bookmarking, and many others.

Chapter 13, Competitor Research and Analysis

Examines ways to find, analyze, and track your competitors. It also provides details on many of the tools you can use to perform these tasks properly and efficiently.

Chapter 14, Content Considerations

Covers many details related to website content. It discusses different concepts, including how to become a resource, short-term content, and long-term content. It also covers content duplication and content verticals.

Chapter 15, Social Networking Phenomenon

Discusses the importance of social networking and social media, and how to leverage the different social platforms and communities including Facebook, Twitter, and Digg. It also covers social media strategy and methods for automating social media interactions. You will create a Twitter scheduler application that you can use as part of your Twitter strategy. The chapter also covers the concept of real-time search.

Chapter 16, Search Engine Marketing

Teaches ways to complement and improve your SEO efforts by utilizing SEM methods. Specifically, the chapter covers how to use Google AdWords to forecast SEO results, and it provides an overview of two of the most important Google platforms: Google AdWords and Google AdSense.

Chapter 17, Search Engine Spam

Discusses things you should stay away from to ensure that the search engines do not penalize your site for spam propagation.

Chapter 18, Industry Buzz

Covers three of the most talked about SEO topics as of this writing: Bing, SearchWiki, and the nofollow link attribute. The chapter also discusses the Keyword Dashboard tool, which can help you compare search results in Bing, Google, and Yahoo!.

Tools come and go, but some of the most basic SEO tips will always be applicable. Most of the significant programming scripts mentioned in the book appear in their entirety in Appendix A. Even if you do not have any technical knowledge, you should still benefit from reading this book.