Rafiq Elmansy (www.rafiqelmansy.com),
a globally renowned designer, author, blogger, and search engine optimization
(SEO) consultant, has come a long way with his recent book: Teach yourself
VISUALLY Search Engine Optimization: the Fast and Easy Way to Learn.
SEO is an exhaustive concept that includes employing
effective techniques and methods to drive more traffic to your blog, fan page,
or a website by increasing its rank and visibility in search results. The book is certainly one of the best resources on SEO
available in the market today.
Rafiq demystifies SEO techniques and methods by teaching you
nearly everything that can be counted as the best SEO practices. What’s more? Almost
all the resources referred to in the book are available for free!
Divided into 14 chapters, the book teaches through step-by-step,
visually illustrated tasks that make learning a fast, easy, and practical
experience for the reader:
Chapter 1, Understanding SEO process, discuses succinct
concepts about SEO techniques and major search engines. Chapter 2, Preparing
your website for SEO, and 3, Building an SEO-friendly website, are
probably the most important stopovers in the entire book since here you learn
the fundamentals of a good website: how to choose a good web hosting service,
create a Privacy Policy page (in seconds!), check browser compatibility, plan
an optimized website, build an .htaccess file, and work with 301 redirect,
among many other techniques.
The W3C Markup Validation tool provided here assists you to
effectively track and correct any errors in your website’s HTML code. Remember,
results-oriented SEO starts from an error-free webpage that is regularly
crawled by search engine robots.
Chapter 4, Mastering keywords, teaches you almost
everything about keywords and lets you experiment with such valuable online
resources as Bing Search, YouTube Keyword Tool, Yahoo Clues, etc.
Chapter 5, Building on-page SEO, is about how to
create an HTML document, work with meta tags, optimize your images, improve
your website’s loading time, and so forth. Chapter 6, Building off-page SEO,
deals with many areas that one needs to work off-page: backlinks, traffic
comparison, submitting links to a directory, and a press release. Next Chapter,
Working with content, takes you to quite a few online resources to
develop compelling content for your website – content is king!
Chapter 8 and 9, Working with Google Analytics and Using
search engine webmaster tools cover all the relevant walkthroughs in
traffic analyses and webmaster controls. If you’ve done all the tasks up to
here, you will undeniably feel that you’re becoming an expert in SEO. Trust me.
Chapter 10, Working with social media and SEO, is remarkably
appealing since here you will learn how to effectively market your webpage or
blog through Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter, and manage all the accounts
with the free tool, HootSuite.
The next three chapters cover key areas like AdWords campaign,
Wordpress, and earning from your website’s SEO ranking. If you’re a big
company, you will find the last chapter quite helpful in how to employ an SEO
team to manage your online presence.
Eventually, with so much to offer, the book is for everyone:
an individual looking for better social networking, a novice blogger, or an
expert Internet marketer.
