Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part 1: Getting Started with SEO 5

Chapter 1: Surveying the Search Engine Landscape 7

Chapter 2: Search Results, Deconstructed 21

Chapter 3: Your One-Hour, Search Engine–Friendly Website Makeover 33

Chapter 4: Beating the Competition: Planning a Powerful Search Engine Strategy 53

Chapter 5: Making Your Site Useful and Visible 73

Part 2: Building Search Engine-Friendly Sites 89

Chapter 6: Picking Powerful Keywords 91

Chapter 7: Creating Pages That Search Engines Love 111

Chapter 8: Designing for Speed 143

Chapter 9: Designing for Mobile 153

Chapter 10: Using Structured Data Markup 161

Chapter 11: Avoiding Things That Search Engines Hate 173

Chapter 12: Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap 195

Chapter 13: Bulking Up Your Site: Competing with Content 213

Chapter 14: Finding Traffic Through Local Search Marketing 239

Part 3: Adding Your Site to the Indexes and Directories 267

Chapter 15: Getting Your Pages into the Search Engines 269

Chapter 16: Submitting to the Directories 285

Chapter 17: Product Search: Remember the Shopping Directories and Retailers 295

Part 4: After You’ve Submitted Your Site 319

Chapter 18: Using Link Popularity to Boost Your Position 321

Chapter 19: Finding Sites to Link to Yours 347

Chapter 20: Even More Great Places to Get Links 371

Chapter 21: Social Networking — Driven by Drivel 385

Chapter 22: Video and Images: Putting Your Best Face Forward 393

Chapter 23: Beyond the Basics 403

Chapter 24: When Google Bites Back: A Guide to Catastrophe 415

Part 5: The Part of Tens 435

Chapter 25: Ten-Plus Myths and Mistakes 437

Chapter 26: Ten-Plus Ways to Stay Updated 445

Chapter 27: Ten-Plus Useful Things to Know 451

Index 465

About the Author

Peter Kent is an e-commerce consultant who specializes in search engine optimization (SEO). A former VP of Web Solutions at a national ISP and VP of Marketing and search engine optimization expert at Indigio, he has been involved in the online world since 1984 and has been writing about the Internet since 1993. Peter is the author of nearly 60 books as well as hundreds of articles.