SEO Help: 20 Steps to Take Your Website to Google's #1 Page

It is always a little tricky when an author reviews his own book. The temptation to see no evil is always great and the effort required to resist it is, often, Herculean. I am helped, in this case, by the fact that sufficient time has passed since it came out for it to get some independent reviews (on Amazon) and for me to get the all necessary perspective. By reviewing a book I have written I get the opportunity to assess it for myself a little more closely and, in addition, to explain the rationale which made it possible.

I have been working with computers since DOS first came out and was hailed as the end-all-be-all of computer software. I was privileged enough to join the web long before it became the WWW we are all familiar with and was involved in the very early stages of putting websites together and then looking to find them on a web which was way smaller than it is today.

Website building has gone from being the province of techies to being within the reach of pretty much anyone who can point and click and, in that time, the web itself has grown and changed and become an inescapable and overcrowded part of our lives. As it has grown search engine optimization (SEO) has become both less technical in its application and more complicated in the analysis required to make it work successfully.

In an overcrowded web, the success of your website depends on its ability to be found by those who are most likely to need the information it contains and the services it has to offer. The problem is that the web's size dilutes what is available making it harder for those searching to find you and putting the onus of optimizing your website properly directly on you, its owner.

This is where SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google's #1 page comes in. Written in plain English my intention was to take you through everything you need in order to make your website appear on Google's top page. SEO is a fluid, dynamic field where search engine algorithms and website positioning change on a daily basis, so the question really has to be, did I succeed? Well, first let me tell you that the book I wrote is practical and intended to allow you to start optimizing your website from the first chapter. Second, when I wrote it, I had firmly in mind the fact that as search engine acceptable practices change, it was important to create, for you an SEO blueprint which would be easy to fit into the world you do on your website in terms of online promotion and content creation and last in terms of core SEO activities.

With this in mind what I wrote in SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google's #1 page is safe to use no matter what and, because it has been based upon complicated search engine theory which forms the core of search science, it will help you for a very long time indeed. The feedback I have received from those who have bought the book and put it into practice has been more than encouraging. It has shown me that my belief in transparency in SEO and the need to explain its practicalities has paid off. Many of the emails I received have also reinforced my personal view that you do not need to be overtly technical in order to put something into effect.

Everything I have written about I have tested and tried in over 120 test websites based in different Google data centres so I know that it will work and it will get your site on Google's first page. The one thing which I have been questioned over is my focus on Google when there are three major search engines on the web.

It is a valid point. As a search engine optimizer I respond to what the market asks of me and, in this case, 90% of clients will want their website on Google's first page. Google is the largest search engine with the most global traffic so focusing on it made sense from my point of view because I took the view that you only have a limited number of hours to devote to the search engine optimization of your website anyway. It is correct to assume that they need to give you the greatest return for your investment. Then there is the other thing: Google is at the cutting edge of search technology. Everything which works on it will work on Yahoo! and BING, so there is no real need to focus on anything beyond Google.

My book, of course is far from comprehensive. SEO is, these days, such a vast field that I could have easily written a tome just on on-page optimization and the detailed work required to make it truly successful. The bottom line, however, is that it will give you everything you need to step-by-step successfully optimize your website plus it will give you the knowledge necessary to know when to outsource SEO, how to measure its effectiveness and how to best guide those you choose to work on it for you.