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Get To #1 on Google
Book Review

27 July 2009

by Huw Collingbourne

Get To #1 on Google (in easy steps)
by Ben Norman
$14.99 / £10.99
http://www.ineasysteps.com
Pages: 216
ISBN: 978-1-84078-382-7

Long gone are the days when a few well chosen ‘meta’ tags in a page of HTML might be expected to get your web site ranked highly by an Internet search engine. These days search engines are cleverer - they don’t just look at ‘meta’ tags, they analyse all kinds of other information in an attempt to avoid being tricked into giving a site an unjustified high ranking; meanwhile, clever site designers have figures out many of the search engines’ strategies and come up with even trickier tricks in an attempt to fool them.

If you happen to be running a well-known we site - for, say, the BBC or CNN - you will probably get a high ranking without having to put any effort into it. If, however, you are running one of the countless millions of less well-known web sites, all of which are competing for high Google rankings, you may be glad of some expert help. “Get To #1 on Google” may be just the help you need.

Google is now by far the dominant search engine. The chances are that many of the techniques needed to score highly with Google will work with competing tools too. However, getting a high ranking on Google alone would satisfy most people and, accordingly, this book barely even mentions other search engines.

In theory nobody outside Google really knows how the Google engine works out its rankings and so books like this one are largely based on guess work. In fact, Google is so widely used that a great many deductions can be made about the reasons why some sites score better than others and those deductions can then be tested on your own sites. The aim is to implement ‘Search Engine Optimization’ (SEO) to make your site particularly attractive to the software ‘robots’ sent out by Google to trawl the web for pages to list when someone searches for a specific topic.

The author of this book enumerates a broad range of strategies that may help to increase your site rating. These include everything from well-known tricks such as embedding keywords and metadata to more obscure techniques related to your web site’s structure and code.

It turns out that there are numerous simple but powerful techniques which can be used to help you promote your site by making sure that Google knows what the site is about and finds articles relevant to its subject. You can, of course, cheat by trying to deceive Google into thinking the site is about something that it isn’t - but the author strongly warns against doing that; not only is this unethical but it may also cause Google to blacklist your site, ensuring that it never appears in Google rankings!

This is a nicely produced, colourful, well-illustrated book that does an excellent job of explaining SEO strategies. If you want to make your site perform well in Google searches, this would be $15 well spent.