The Ultimate Website Promotion Handbook - By Chris Standring

Book Tagline: “A step-by-step guide to getting page 1 ranking with the major search engines & to making money with your website”.
Verdict: A short & snappy book that does not take much effort to read, but contains a wealth of really useful & easy to apply information on promoting your website. Smilies: 4 out of 5 smilies This is one of those good books that quickly gets to the point. You are not reading this book for the author’s prose but for an insight into how to do something useful with your website. This book has only 128 pages, with “only” being a positive attribute. So many technical type books are so long winded. When it comes to a how-to book less is more.

The author describes himself as an entrepreneur & a musician who has dabbled in launching websites for a number of years. More of a building a site from your garage than spending venture capital money. Again, a good thing as most of us are operating on our own time & launching sites for a multitude of reasons: entertainment, learning experience, promotion or maybe to try & make a buck or two or a few quid on the side.

The focus of this book is not on the actual building of a website but how to ensure what you build does not sit in the dark, but is out there in the interweb strutting it’s stuff, punching above it’s weight & making a damn good impression. The science / art of search engine optimisation is made a very heavy-weight topic in a lot of books/articles while in reality it is not that difficult. The strength of this book is that the author focuses on what you need to do to get visibility for your site on the search engines. It’s not mumbo-jumbo but a series of steps that need to be borne in mind at every stage from building your site, to posting new content. Follow this good advice & your site may not get page 1 ranking but will be primed for visibility.

The book is broken into five chapters, the first being getting started. The author is focused throughout the book on making money from your site, but you can scan over these sections if your site is not sales focused. This first chapter is a bit weak but ploughs through the basic issues of picking a domain name, site hosting & provides some ideas of areas which can generate cash online.

The second chapter I found interesting & it focuses on the building of the site. It goes through the basic elements like design, font, content & provides solid good advice. Other options for your site are discussed like newsletters, ebooks, flash & audio/video. Reading through these options makes you think - how could I incorporate these features. What you realise if you are not a real techie is that these features are accessible & can be used quite easily.

The third chapter alone justifies the price of the book. It discusses optimisation. In very clear language the author outlines what a web-page should contain to get indexed correctly on Google. The focus is on Google but the advice should be equally relevant for the other search engines. An overview of how sites are crawled & indexed is given but the real action is the spider food that your site needs to provide. The critical issue of meta-tags for descriptions & headings is outlined so clearly & simply that you will read it & fundamentally grasp it. After you read this you will intrinsically understand what your pages needs to contain. The importance of content is made crystal clear. The chapter finishes with an excellent list of what to avoid - spelling out the dangers of using bad bad practices.

An extract of this chapter is provided on the author’s site. The fourth chapter discusses the crucial area of linking. Google puts the issue of how many sites are linking to you as its most important criteria. This is a difficult area. How do you get sites linking to you? The fundamentals involved are explained in a clear & simple way. The issue of internal links is addressed first. The need for your site to be navigable for the spiders is crucial & it’s one area that you need to get right. There are some goods ideas in this section, requiring you to re-read to fully grasp the concepts. The issue of external links makes interesting reading. This area is a challenge for most sites, but the solutions are tricky to come by. The author offers some solid advice like making it easy for others to link to you & definitely points you in the right direction.

The last chapter is really only relevant for those with $$ signs in front of them. Facilitating online shopping & the like are outlined. The advice on the use of mailing listing is quite good & addresses the area of how to manage a mailing list once it grows to a decent size.

Throughout the book the author provides a good amount of quality links to resources & these are nicely summarised at the back under areas such as linking & e-commerce.

Overall A good guide - that does what it says on the tin. Perfect - if you are starting a website or if have one up & running - but want a better understanding of what you need to achieve better search engine visibility. A quick read, follow by a slower re-read will pay dividends.

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