Product Review : Rankings Revealed

Search engine expert Sean Burns has a winner on his hands with Rankings Revealed. Of the several "search engine secrets" books I've read, I found this by far the easiest to read and follow. Granted, it lacks the sophistication of the most intensive volumes in this area, but as a beginner guide, it is exceptional.

Even though his focus is on the crawler-based search engines (i.e., the ones you can optimize for, because they "crawl" or inspect your site as the basis for how they rank it in the results), Sean gives you a quick overview of all of the major search engines, explaining the basics of how they gather and display site data. He then goes into detail on basic techniques for getting your site recognized, listed, and well-ranked in the major search engines, focusing on Google, since it is by far the largest source of search engine traffic for most sites.

Sean covers all of the major search engine optimization "secrets" that aren't really all that secret, but nonetheless necessary to get your pages ranked well in the search engines. He explains in a very clear style what you need to do, and why. He also goes into what not to do, since certain techniques are likely to get you banned, or at least poorly rated. I found this section to be particularly useful, since some of the techniques discussed have been highly publicized, and are, of course, tempting to implement in the struggle for higher search engine rankings.

Finally, Sean gives you several search engine optimization case studies at the end of his ebook, where he illustrates how he optimized particular pages or an entire web site. He briefly describes how he implemented each of his recommended techniques. This is a nice feature of the book, since it gives you a chance to review the information from a different perspective.

In summary, this is an extremely well-written and informative basic guide to optimizing to achieve high search engine rankings. Personally, I consider it the most useful of the several search engine optimization volumes that I've read, and as such give it my highest recommendation.

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