How This Book Is Organized / Search Engine Optimization for Dummies

have basic HTML skills in order to optimize a site for the search engines. If

you need more information about HTML, take a look at HTML 4 For Dummies,

5th Edition, by Ed Tittel and Natanya Pitts (Wiley).

How This Book Is Organized

Like all good reference tools, this book is designed to be read “as needed."

It’s divided into several parts: the basics, building search-engine-friendly Web

sites, getting your site into the search engines, what to do after your site is

indexed by the search engines, search engine advertising, and the Part of

Tens. So if you just want to know how to find sites that will link to your Web

site, read Chapter 15. If you need to understand the principles behind getting

links to your site, read Chapter 14. If all you need today is to figure out what

keywords are important to your site, Chapter 5 is for you.

However, search engine optimization is a pretty complex subject, and all the

topics covered in this book are interrelated. Sure, you can register your site

with the search engines, but if your pages aren’t optimized for the search

engines, you may be wasting your time! You can create pages the search

engines can read, but if you don’t pick the right keywords, it’s a total waste

of time. So I recommend that you read everything in this book; it will make a

huge difference in how well your pages are ranked in the search engines.

Part I: Search Engine Basics

In this part, I provide, yep, the basics — the foundation on which you can

build your search-engine-optimization skills. Which search engines are impor-

tant, for instance. In fact, what is a search engine. And what’s a search direc-

tor y. And why am I using the term search system. In this part, you find out

the basics of sensible site creation, discover how to pick the keywords that

people are using to find your business, and discover how to do a few quick

fixes to your site.

Part II: Building Search-Engine-Friendly

Sites

Do you have any idea how many sites are invisible to the search engines. Or

that, if they’re not invisible, are built such that search engines won’t see the

information they need to index the site in the way the site owners would like.

Introduction