Alex To Books

This book is good for a newcomer to search engine optimization, but anyone who has been working on promoting a website will already know or assume all of the information in this book. If you are brand new to SEO then this book is a good starting point, but otherwise spend your time browsing the web or using SEO descussion forums, because the information will be more current and more in debth.

I bought this book a couple of months ago, and put all the advice into practice on my website. The results have been great and my ranking is continuing to grow. The book is well written and contains a great range of practical advice and information on getting your site ranked highly. The Chapter on Link Strategies is particularly good, this is an area that I had not really considered before reading this book, and it now makes up a considerable part of my search engine strategy.

Buy this book if you want a competitive advantage in your search engine strategy.

I wish I had some good things to say about this book, but I really don't. More than anything it reads like a historical document as opposed to offering any fresh ideas on search engine's or search engine marketing. Rife with outdated technologies and solutions, this book is in dire need of an update, not just a republishing.

I spent most of my time skimming through this book looking for anything currently relevant on the search engine landscape. I did find their discussion of the "engine behind Google's search technology".

"PigeonRankTM is a system for ranking web pages developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Standford University. Brin argued that low-cost pigeon clusters (PCs) could be used to compute the relative value of web pages faster than human editors or machine-based algorithms."

You can read more about PigeonRank on Google's website. Unlike the authors of this book, who appear to take PigeonRank at face value, you might want to read the small print at the bottom of the page:

"Note: This page was posted for April Fool's Day - 2002."

I'll concede that the above note may not have been on the page back when this book was published, it was common knowledge in the SEO community that this was, in fact, an April Fool's prank.

Marketing Through Search Optimization does provide a pretty detailed narrative of the history of search engines, in general. Though one must take that with a grain of salt once you consider the depth of research that was put into the PigeonRank section.

In all, the strategies listed nothing new or that isn't readily available for free online. Some of their methods cross the line into spamming territory, though they also concede that too much of certain practices are likely to get you banned.

Finally, the end of the book lists a number of tools of the trade. Many of them might be helpful tools, on the current SEO landscape, however many of them are simply spam generators, some of which have been singled-out by Google as such.

If you are a crafts person, like you have a house with a lot of craft materials in it then this book is perfect. I dont have a lot of craft materials. I dont consider craft fabric, tailors chalk, embroidery thread,felt, varnish, extra buttons, fimo, ect. I got these directly out of the book. I dont have any of those things. I couldnt preform any projects because I didnt have any of this. Now if you have some of these things then this book is great! It explains everything with pictures and easy-to-understand words. I'd like to hear your comments too!

The details from the publisher appropriately say "general review" because it is SO general. The details of US government that you really need for this test are absent from the review (come on, it's an AP test, they're looking for college-level understanding) and the review questions at the end of each chapter and the practice tests are completely based on almost word for word the book material and were so much weirder/harder than the actual test. I don't think this book helped me at all for the test, and unfortunately I had to buy it for class anyway or I never would've wasted my money.

I think if you want a 3 on the test- review only with this book. If you want a 4/5 use your textbook extensively (like I did) or get a much better book.

I purchased this for a European History course I was taking. I expect my text books to be moderately tedious to read but as history books go, this one was long, drawn out and painful to suffer through. This is not the text to use if you wish to inspire and excite your students about European History, there has to be a better option out there.

Expectations: I was expecting this to be sort of an encyclopedia of different ideas, concepts, and organizations within the New Age movement. It'd be sort of basic, like how "Positive Magic" is for Paganism, just introducing the ideas and then telling you were to go to learn more if you're interested. I'm having to stumble my way through a variety of New Age topics, almost none of which introduce themselves. (Quite the opposite of Paganism topics, where introductions abound in greater number than any further extrapolations.) All of them seem to assume you already know how all these things connect, so they rush on foward, and by the end of the book you're still not completely sure what they meant.

Actual result: The book is... well, it is a dictionary. It has the exact same thickness, arrangement, and formatting as a college pocket dictionary, with the same briefness of entries. Many of the entries are actually people's names (authors, or characters in books.) Entries for words mentioned in many languages (such as "life energy" or "peace") are followed with a list of how various languages call it. It's... well, this book is useless to me. It has the same lack of introduction or direction that I've seen in any other New Age books.

This book was made from a tesis presentend by the author following 9/11. There's a lot of curious informations,much literature "hollow" speaking but very few considerations about each writer's point of view and, especially, doesn't have a clear link about modern terrorism and literature. It's a poor work and you finish the book without realizing what the author means with it, but I have one bet: just to be the first one to say something (anything) about the matter, and seems "deep" and "intelligent" with nonsense considerations. If you want something really good and useful about the matter, try The Modern Library "Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent", it bears a introduction and a posface full of good information and the subjects terrorism and literature ARE deeply linked. And it's cheaper!

I came across this book as I find my name mentioned in a paragraph which says I became "wealthy" from managing a bbs forum on Prodigy. No, not really. No, not at all. No. Not even remotely. Not even, well off. Really offensive such a bald error.
So, judging from the misinformation about me....wonder about the book.
But, we all make mistakes?

The first 21 pages are interesting reading. If it ended there, the author would have a decent magazine article. But the text goes on adding very little to the first couple of chapters. The chapter on "the uninym" is a curiosity. I can't figure out how it supports the main claims. The chapter on generation and class unearths tired generalizations (I still don't understand how someone born in late-1957 is a baby boomer. I didn't give a damn about Vietnam or the Haight, but only about queues for gasoline.) Parts 2-5 of the book, the examples of the author's overall claims about propaganda, barely support the claims at all, instead indulging in descriptive and biographical information that is incidental to the claim. More to the point, the book is full of errors. Just a sample in case you're interested. Marshall McLuhan would be astonished to learn that he described TV as a hot medium and print as cold (p. 28). Everytime I feel I can explain McLuhan like a master, someone has to write something like this! The music chapters alone would have my students reeling: e.g., The Red Hot Chili Peppers are not a Seattle band (p. 108); they're from LA. REM was not poised to be the successor to Nirvana (p. 112); they made it big a decade earlier. "Shattered" was not a Rolling Stones commentary on the successes of the 80s (p. 124); I was playing it as a UCLA undergrad in 1978 . . . it's on the Some Girls album. The wordsmith of Bikini Kill is not Kathi Wilson (p. 127) but Kathleen Hanna.

I found the first 25-30 pages interesting and enlightening, then gradually lost interest, although there are some bright spots on pages 30-334. Don't get me wrong, it's worth reading, but it gets somewhat tedious as you move through the book.

I loved Bill McFarlan's "Drop The Pink Elephant," but "Are You Good Enough" is simply unpleasant to read and contains very little useful information.

The book is based on a story about a ficititious couple and their son. Each chapter begins with an event in their lives (for example, the wife overeating while waiting for her husband to get home from work), and attempts to tie that into a couple of pages of text explaining how (in this instance) the wife is overeating because she's really hungry for love.

Unfortunately, the only way in which this book made me feel more self-confident and/or better about myself is the knowledge that my own books actually contain useful information, laid out in steps that can easily be followed by anyone.

Overall, "Are You Good Enough" is a huge disappointment.

This one fits into that rare category which is a WASTE of money. The title is catchy but that is as far as it goes.

This book was a complete waste of time unless you are actually a trained buddist. It's a bunch of non-sensical stuff that means nothing to the layman.