Review of SEO School - The Full Edition

Written by Dave Navarro on July 12, 2008

I posted a recent mini review of SEO School a few weeks ago and promised a fuller, meatier review later when I had a chance to digest it all.  If you’ve been on the fence about this book and are looking for a solid review of SEO School that doesn’t pull back the punches, here goes.

Disclaimer: I know the author (Naomi) personally, which is good, because I’ve called her for a lot of follow-up advice on what I’ve learned in the book. But I only provide reviews on this blog for tools I use on a regular basis, so what you read below is based on experience, not fluff.  All links below are indeed affiliate links, but I think that’s fair given I’ve spent 2 hours working up this review for you, right?

This Book Isn’t For You … OR IS IT? (Dunn - Dunn -  Dunnnnnnnnnnn!)

If you’re an SEO master, this book isn’t going to teach you anything new.  This book is geared towards people who don’t have a whole lot of SEO knowledge to begin with. Which is funny, because there are layers of knowledge, and we don’t always know what we’re missing.  For example, I have some good knowledge of how to write SEO optimized articles (which I do a lot as a freelancer), so I feel fairly experienced in that area.  But after reading SEO School I realize I didn’t know much about optimizing my site itself.

So this book was a good read for me - and it may be for you as well if you don’t understand some of the finer points about optimizing link text, link position, “meta” and other stuff.  I sorely needed that on my blog, and this book was very helpful.  After reading to the end of SEO School, I made a lot of changes on my blog, and I’m already seeing an increase in traffic for keywords that are important to me.  Nothing insane (it’s only been a week), but it’s trending upward, which is exactly what I want.

Where This Book Can Really Save Your Ass

If you’re new to site optimization, the idea of mastering SEO can be intimidating.  There are people out there with $1000 home study courses packed with endless hours of all the things you have to do to rank #1 for your keyword serach terms.  I never really considered doing much SEO on my site because I didn’t want to devote all that time to learn the ins-and-outs of Google’s secret rules for ranking well … especially knowing that Google can will change it rules anytime it feels like it … and all that studying might be for nothing.

I’m not going to spend 50 hours honing my SEO skills.  It’s just not in the cards for me.  But what I really like about SEO School is that it let me get a huge SEO payoff with just an hour’s reading. How? It goes step by step through the most important thing an SEO beginner needs to know: how to stop making the simple, innocent mistakes that screw up your SEO in the first place.

Not too long ago I was speaking to a number of well known bloggers and one of them said, “I’m not Dave so I don’t know his keywords, but it seems to me he should have higher search traffic than he does currently.” I was thinking, “Yeah, tell me about it …” and frustrated that I didn’t know what to do.  But as I read through SEO School I began to see things I was doing with my site that seemed innocent enough, but that were putting an unintentional damper on my rankings.  Things that I didn’t think were important, but were.

What I Got Out Of This Book In The First Read-Through

Without giving the content of the book away, I’m going to break down the things that I was able to improve after reading SEO School.  It’s too soon to give definitive numbers as to how it’s working out, but I can tell you that I’m already seeing an increase in the search traffic I’m getting for the keywords related to my Becoming an Early Riser program.

Here’s what I’ve learned from SEO School:

• How the type of site I’m running determines the type of search terms I want to rank for. This is important because I was previously trying to rank for keywords I can’t hope to compete with at the moment - now I know how to pick more effective keyword phrases for the type of traffic I want.

• Why the keywords I didn’t think I wanted are actually better off for me. This was hard to deal with at first, but it makes sense when Naomi explains why this is the case.

• How to research (and learn from) my competition’s SEO tactics. This is something i didn’t do, because I didn’t have a good strategy for doing it.  Now I do.  Bwuhahahaha ….

• How to ethically influence the SEO effects I’m getting from other people’s sites. This wasn’t rocket science - but it did clue me in to a simple way to get a lot more “Google juice” from people who reference my site.

• Smarter ways to use my title tags, meta description, and page URLs. Not much I can say here without giving it away … but this stuff helped me a lot.

• How to optimize where links appear on the page (and what kind of links appear). I didn’t think this mattered much.  Turns out it matters tons.

Three Things To Consider Before Buying This Book

As strongly as I feel SEO School is well worth the $39 price, there are a few things you need to know before picking this up:

• Naomi swears like a sailor throught the entire book.  If you read her blog (Ittybiz), this is no surprise to you.  Some people might be offended by this; most people won’t.  She’s not “offensive” in anything she says, she just narrates the book with the same straight-up tone she uses in her blog.  I love it.

• This book does not teach “black hat” SEO.  if you’ve never heard of that term, basically “black hat” SEO involves tricks and scammy, sleazy stuff to game the Google system for instant high SEO rankings - basically the dark side of the force.  You can take over the universe using the power of the Dark Side, but sooner than you expect it, Google will cut off your hand with a lightsaber, blow up your fully operational battle station and bring balance to the Google force.  SEO School focuses on “White Hat” SEO, basically the good stuff that makes Google like you because you are playing by the rules, and Google will reward you with yummy search engine traffic and a promise to never let George Lucas destroy your childhood by producing three unbearble “prequels” to your website.

• This book will not make you rich overnight.  No book will.  But many people just can’t get that through their heads.  So if you get to the end of SEO School saying “hey, this doesn’t tell me how to be #1 tomorrow, dammit!” then you’ll just have to get over it.  What this book will tell you is how to get better results than you’re getting now.

And better results than you’re getting now is sweet, sweet stuff.  Even George Lucas can’t screw that up.

Tell Naomi that Dave sent you and download SEO School right now.