Search Engine Marketing Kit By Dan Thies – Everything But Yoko Ono
Trying to document the search engine marketing industry is like trying to chase your reflection in a room of mirrors, every time you think you have it in your hands – you turn around and a new opportunity is standing behind you. To date, the channels used to keep track of the news and happenings around search engines have been as dynamic as the industry itself, with interactive blogs and forums being the media of choice.
As I flip through the eBooks and studies on search engine optimization and paid search marketing over the years, it’s like flipping through a coffee stained scrapbook of the 20th century.. filled with ghosts of the past such as Direct Hit, keyword density, doorway pages, Altavista, reciprocal linking farms and GoTo.com. How does one publish a how to guide on search engine marketing without that guide being outdated before it hits the shelves?
Dan Thies from SEO Research Labs and SitePoint may have pulled off the impossible with his new guide for the search engine industry – The Search Engine Marketing Kit. If Aaron Wall’s SEOBook is the dynamic blog based Sgt. Pepper of the search engine marketing world, Thies’s Search Engine Marketing Kit is its White Album. Search Engine Marketing Kit proves to be an in depth overview of SEO, Keyword Research, Paid Search, Business Guide, Tools and Interviews for anyone ranging from the advanced SEO techie to the beginning college intern.
I found the interview with Andy Beal of KeywordRanking.com quite entertaining. Andy tells Dan how he started out as a sales rep for WorldMall.com and then seeing SEO as the future of the Internet Marketing, studied day in and day out on search related forums and sites to build the knowledge and feed his drive to transform WorldMall.com into WebSourced – the world’s largest group of SEO companies : Talk about inspiration. Chapter 5 on Running a Search Engine Marketing Business covers everything from consulting to setting up your SEM process – the only thing lacking is a section on how to dress for business meetings.
We rarely review a product on Search Engine Journal, but at the request of SitePoint – a true resource on web site building and marketing, I read through the copy they sent me (279 pages of information – need to clean out a space on my bookshelf for this puppy) and highly recommend Search Engine Marketing Kit to anyone involved in the Paid Search or Search Engine Optimization fields. It’s so cool it even comes with its own CD Rom!
