Driving Search Traffic to Your Company's Website
by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt
IBM Press/Pearson plc, 2006
Trade Paperback, 560 pages
ISBN 0131852922
Too many books on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising are narrow, technical, and gimmicky -- aimed at the small entrepreneur. Search Engine Marketing, Inc. is a refreshing exception. The book examines the two main types of search marketing -- organic search and paid search, with some discussion of shopping bots -- from the perspective of a larger company. The authors tackle the thorny issue of how an enterprise can successfully implement search marketing in each of its important disciplines.
"Part 1: The Basics of Search Marketing" explains the importance of search marketing to a company and then describes how search engines, search marketing, and searchers work.
"Part 2: Develop Your Search Marketing Program" explains how to identify your company website goals, measure success, define your search marketing strategy, and sell your search marketing proposal to both executives who hold the purse strings and the team you must assemble to execute the plan. This book is unique in outlining how a search marketing team can be assembled and the work divided between them, including which tasks should be centralized and which should be dispersed throughout the organization. The authors provide a useful list of early search marketing tasks that suggest a team approach rather than search marketing attempted by one or two individuals alone:
The authors also discuss factors involved in determining whether your company should outsource one or more of these functions to an external vendor. A special sidebar gives three interesting tips on "How do you spot a spammer?" to keep you from hiring a sleazy SEO firm that might get your site banned from the search engines. This section concludes by explaining how to develop a search marketing business case based on estimated additional annual income.
"Part 3: Execute Your Search Marketing Program" gets down to the specific tasks and techniques of search marketing. One chapter is devoted to determining how effectively a company site is being indexed and how to remove blockages to indexing. Another discusses selecting target keywords and tools that can help -- one of the best explanations of this topic I have seen.
The chapter on optimizing content focuses on organic search. The authors provide a thorough and reasoned explanation of the various factors that go into a ranking algorithm and provide guidance as to which are important enough to spend time on. Landing pages are usually thought of in the context of paid search, but this book provides an excellent description on how to develop landing pages for multiple keywords based on "meaning elements." They also provide examples of how to develop page titles that get the best ranking -- as well as the highest click-through rate. Since larger companies often use content management systems with dynamic webpages, the book provides helpful insights into spotting and correcting problems that slow down or stop search engine spiders from indexing those pages.
A separate chapter on attracting links to your company's website is frankly excellent! The authors explain how poor links can hurt your site as well as how to approach other sites for links. The book also includes information on link-friendly URLs, link audits and tools, the importance of keywords in anchor text, internal links, affiliate links, finding link directories, what to watch out for in linking partners, and paid links.
The chapter on paid search is also very good. However, a book-length work like Andrew Goodman's Winning Results with Google AdWords provides greater depth than the authors can provide in a single chapter. A chapter on "Make Search Marketing Operational" explains how to develop, manage, and monitor a corporate team to perform all the functions for effective search marketing. The final chapter gives the authors' take on the future of search marketing. The book concludes with a 28-page glossary of hundreds of terms used in the field.
If you are tasked with search marketing in a larger company, I can't think of a better guidebook to this complex field. It is comprehensive, up-to-date, and full of helpful detail and examples. The book would also provide an excellent overview of corporate challenges for new employees, as well as search consultants and search marketing firms that work with larger companies. Smaller company marketing departments can profit as well from this comprehensive view, though they'll need to outsource more of the time-intensive operations. 
