I just finished reading Dan Theis’ SEO Fast Start. At only 100 pages it was a quick and easy read. Dan really tries to engage the reader with his (somewhat odd) sense of humor throughout the guide. I found the material to be quite basic. Though I believe Dan is targeting small business / website owners rather than professional SEOs, as he states on his, not as ugly as the majority, sales landing page:
Before you spend a dime hiring someone else to optimize your website for search engines, why not take a moment to consider how much you can accomplish on your own? You may decide to hire a professional at some point, because search engine optimization isn’t for everyone, but after reading my book you will be far more informed about the process.
I suppose if I had a website and didn’t know how to optimize it for search engines this guide may be quite valuable.
As someone who does SEO for clients for a living there wasn’t a whole lot of new info here. He did get me thinking about internal linking strategies and distributing PageRank (oh my god, yes I did use that word!) internally. However I am not sure that I agree with Dan’s over-zealous use of NoFollow. This is a DoFollow blog after all.
Dan suggests adding NoFollow to all outgoing links and to internal links as well. I guess it makes sense that it is not necessary to have the bots follow a link to your privacy policy or legal disclaimers. But would that really make that big of a difference? And why then do I not see more sites implementing NoFollow in this way? Is this some big secret that only Dan knew until now?
Has anyone else read SEO Fast Start? What do you think of Dan’s use of NoFollow?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 at 5:05 pm and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
4 Responses to “SEO Fast start by Dan Theis”
It isn’t a big secret, people have been channelling PageRank around to where they want it to go for years.
If you want a mainstream example, look at the footer of Epinions.com and compare that to rent.com, both Ebay companies.
Then look up revenge of the mininet and the bonus Dynamic linking ebook by Leslie Rhode.
Then again, some people don’t do it very well, and don’t get enough links to be able to get all their content indexed in the main index anyway.
Thanks for the examples and reading suggestions Andy. I’ll be sure to read more into this.
Interesting read, I will get this book you mentioned.
Thanks for the recommendation. I have not read the book you recommended, Andy. As far as I know, some websites would not like to offer do follow links to gather and not to spread around all the powers from their back links.