SEO For Dummies, 7th Edition

Introduction

Welcome to SEO For Dummies, 7th Edition. What on earth would you want this book for? Can’t you just build a website and let your web designer get the site into the search engines? All web designers and web design firms say they can do that for you, after all. Or can’t you simply pay someone to do a little SEO work for you? SEO firms and consultants are as common as beer vendors at a baseball game. If you have a website and you’re not getting emails from SEO companies, you’re in a tiny minority!

Well, unfortunately, it’s not that simple. (Okay, fortunately for me, because if it were simple, Wiley wouldn’t pay me to write this book.) The fact is that search engine optimization is a little complicated. Not brain surgery complicated, but not as easy as “Sure, we’ll do the SEO when we build your site.” (No, you can’t trust your web developer to do this for you; they all offer the service, but very few understand SEO! In fact, web designers and developers hate it and only offer the service because all the competition claims to provide it.)

The vast majority of websites don’t have a chance in the search engines. Why? Because of simple mistakes. Because they trust firms that shouldn’t be trusted. Because the people creating the sites don’t have a clue what they should do to make the site easy for search engines to work with. Because they don’t understand the role of links pointing to their site, and because they’ve never thought about keywords. Because, because, because. ...