Review: Introducing SEO (Your Quick Start Guide to Effective SEO Practices)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) –  according to authors Shenoy and Prabhu – provides ways to “improve the visibility of websites using different strategies and techniques” and that is the working definition for SEO as it is used in  the book Introducing SEO – Your quick-start guide to effective SEO practices.

The audience for the book could be writers, marketers, or others who support SEO efforts or those who want an introduction to the topic with the idea of becoming the technical support for SEO efforts. The authors have a good grasp of the subject and pick an interesting and informative array of topics.

Shenoy is a technical writer by trade, coming from Mumbai and being an author of several other books. Prabhu is a UI Developer specializing in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, with this being his second book.

Effective use of keywords, link building, and online social media marketing appear in part as what Introducing SEO – Your quick-start guide to effective SEO practices covers. These techniques contribute to having a site appear appropriately in search engine results.

Readers will appreciate the many examples and screenshots that appear as with tools such as Google Analytics (page 44-48) providing information on numbers and locations of visitors and trends.

Sitemaps appear as a chapter where the authors explain this as a “list of pages within a website” which can “exist in a form accessible to crawlers, humans, or both” (page 63). The two versions of sitemaps are XML and HTML. The HTML version is human friendly while the XML version is “tailored for the search engines” with sitemaps telling “search engines about the content type of the listed page” (page 63).

Readers should find the example XML and HTML sitemaps appearing in Introducing SEO – Your quick-start guide to Effective SEO practices of interest.

You do not need a prior knowledge of SEO before reading this book as it is meant for a novice audience.

Introducing SEO – Your quick-start guide to effective SEO practices
Aravind Shenoy and Anirudh Prabhu. 2016. New York, New York: Apress [ISBN 978-1-4842-1854-9. 132 pages, including index. USD$29.99 (softcover).]

Note to readers
A version of this review is schedule to appear in Technical Communication.

Reviewed by Jeanette Evans

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