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Website Optimization Secrets Book Review

Gabriel Svennerberg reviews our Website Optimization Secrets book.

Overall Gabriel gives the book a positive review, but gives all the references and statistics short shrift. Other reviewers have praised the level of research and detail in the book, so you can’t please everybody. We thought that solid, research-based facts and trends rather than conventional wisdom were needed in a book like this, especially for such topics as search engine optimization. We thought that putting these references in footnotes helped to maintain the reader’s flow.

The available SEM tips, especially online, is rife with best practices that practitioners are pretty sure are true, but haven’t yet proven. We were careful to report on SEO best practices that we’ve found to work through actual client experience, or empirical tests. The only exception is the SEOMoz.org SEO top positive and negative ranking factors derived from a survey of SEO experts (page 16).

Depending on your interest as a marketer or developer, people tend to like the first or second part of the book better. Gabriel seems to like the second half of the book about web site performance:

“I’m surprised that even though the book covers so many areas it still manages to penetrate each topic pretty deep. Naturally not as deep as a book totally devoted to one of these topics, but still it manages to do more than merely scratch the surface.

The second part of the book about optimizing web performance was really good. The chapters about how to optimize HTML and CSS contained several useful tips as well as references to different tools and resources. The chapter I’m particularly excited about is the one about how to optimize AJAX solutions. It presented me with new concepts and ideas that I found really useful.”

For the full review, see:

Website Optimization [Book Review]