SEO books for bloggers: required reading

If you're serious about blogging, you also have to be serious about search engine optimization.

True, you can hire someone like me to do your basic SEO set-up work, but SEO is a process and you'll have to apply its golden rules day in, day out. Things like knowing how to word anchor links (never ever a "click here!") and how to do alt tags on images.

So, I make the case that blogging and SEO are strongly linked for anyone seeking to become a successful online writer.

There are some good SEO basics books (and some not-so-good SEO books). Here are two I recommend:

Search Engine Optimization For Dummies, Second Edition by Peter Kent. Yes, I'm serious. Good book. OK for intermediates as well as beginners.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible by Jerri L. Ledford. Easy to follow. For beginners.

I'll also point to a good book on xhtml (html) and CSS (cascading style sheets), because it helps to speak the language (er, code):

HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition by Elizabeth Castro. Easy to understand, but far from dumbed down. If I needed to learn something complicated, I'd want Castro explaining it to me.

Books are, of course, old media, nasty as that sounds. If you want to keep up with SEO (a fast-moving serpentine target) and the latest tricks of the trade from "pro bloggers," you'll be using new media.

The next post on Write for Blogs will cover my top 10 SEO/blogger newsletters -- the ones I read whenever they hit my mailbox. Call it continuing education. School's out, for now.

A tale of two how-to SEO books

Just polished off some homework reading, the book "Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day."

One thing the 300-page paperback has going for itself is timeliness: it's about a year old. Quite a few SEO-related books date back five years or so, for some reason. Perhaps that's when the SEO guys starting coming up from the underground.

The authors are Gradiva Couzin and Jennifer Grappone (pictured), who come with a combined 16 years or so of SEO experience. Their products include the book's handy companion site, Your SEO Plan. Check out that site's simple and elegant optimization if you visit.

The book seems to target people doing SEO part-time for their company web sites. The authors take the "one hour a day" concept seriously, telling readers what to do, when to do it and how to chart their progress. Anyone smart enough to handle SEO doesn't need that kind of hand-holding.

The do-this-do-that routine soon got old -- and cluttered up the book. Finding the pockets of good information was almost too much work. Ultimately, I had to force myself to finish it. Too bad, because the authors have a lot to offer.

I'm a student of SEO. Neither novice nor expert. I've had a fair amount of success (and failures) bringing traffic to a dozen or so web sites and blogs over the past decade. (I offer SEO-friendly editorial services to web site owners.)

So when I read Peter Kent's "Search Engine Optimization For Dummies" earlier this year, it was a bit of a sheepish undertaking. But as with some of the better books in this yellow-and-black franchise, woven in with the basics was plenty of information for more-advanced readers. (That kind of parathetical knowledge stacking is what makes the Wall Street Journal so useful to investors of all levels.)

Kent's breezy book was a pleasure to read. It was a good refresher and I learned a lot as well. If I'm a dummy, at least I'm a well-informed one. (Be sure to get the second edition.)

Completists should check out "An Hour a Day." From a library if possible.

The recommendation for beginning and intermediate SEO students is to go with the "Dummies."