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| Website Optimization: Speed, Search Engine & Conversion Rate Secrets | 
| Author: Andrew King
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $22.32
You Save: $17.67 (44%)
Buy New/Used from $22.31
Avg. Customer Rating:  (5 reviews)
Sales Rank: 10791
Format: Illustrated
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 394
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7 x 1.1
ISBN: 0596515081
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.7
EAN: 9780596515089
ASIN: 0596515081
Publication Date: July 15, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Remember when an optimized website was one that merely didn't take all day to appear? Times have changed. Today, website optimization can spell the difference between enterprise success and failure, and it takes a lot more know-how to achieve success. This book is a comprehensive guide to the tips, techniques, secrets, standards, and methods of website optimization. From increasing site traffic to maximizing leads, from revving up responsiveness to increasing navigability, from prospect retention to closing more sales, the world of 21st century website optimization is explored, exemplified and explained. Website Optimization combines the disciplines of online marketing and site performance tuning to attain the competitive advantage necessary on today's Web. You'll learn how to improve your online marketing with effective paid and natural search engine visibility strategies, strengthened lead creation and conversion to sales methods, and gold-standard ad copywriting guidelines. Plus, your increased site speed, reduced download footprint, improved reliability, and improved navigability will work synergistically with those marketing methods to optimize your site's total effectiveness. In this book for business and IT managers, author Andrew King, president of Website Optimization, LLC, has assembled experts in several key specialties to teach you: Search engine optimization -- addressing best (and worst) practices to improve search engine visibility, including step-by-step keyword optimization guidelines, category and tag cloud creation, and guerilla PR techniques to boost inbound links and improve rankings Pay-per-click optimization -- including ad copywriting guidelines, setting profit-driven goals, calculating and optimizing bids, landing page optimization, and campaign management tips Optimizing conversion rates -- increasing leads with site landing page guidelines, such as benefit-oriented copy, credibility-based design, value hierarchies, and tips on creating unique selling propositions and slogans Web performance tuning -- optimizing ways to use (X)HTML, CSS, and Ajax to increase speed, reduce your download footprint, and increase reliability Advanced tuning -- including client-side techniques such as on-demand content, progressive enhancement, and inline images to save HTTP requests. Plus server-side tips include improving parallelism, using cache control, browser sniffing, HTTP compression, and URL rewriting to remap links and preserve traffic Web metrics -- illustrating the best metrics and tools to gather details about visitors and measure web conversion and success rates. Covering both search marketing metrics and web performance measures including Pathloss and waterfall graphs "Website Optimization" not only provides you with a strategy for success, it also offers specific techniques for you and your staff to follow. A profitable website needs to be well designed, current, highly responsive, and optimally persuasive if you're to attract prospects, convert them to buyers, and get them to come back for more. This book describes precisely what you need to accomplish to achieve all of those goals.
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| Customer Reviews:
THE website optimization book for years to come August 27, 2008
This book does more than talk about the basics of SEO. It dives into topics that go well beyond the `technical' aspects (e.g., keywords, titles, etc) and talks about persuasive language, fast load times and engaging websites. Once I saw this, I was very intrigued and told Andy that I'd be happy to review the book.
I'm glad I said yes. The book is excellent...and from what I've seen, it is THE book on Website Optimization. Gone are the days of scouring the web for bits and pieces of info on how to optimize....this book contains it all.
Unlike most other books in this genre, this book is much more than just an overview of the concepts of website optimization. Detailed descriptions, case studies and in-depth discussions of the `why, what and how' of optimization are provided to allow the reader to immediately take action with their own websites.
For those of you interested in the entire spectrum of website optimization (i.e., page load times, search engine friendliness, optimization techniques etc), this is the book for you. I expect that this book will be THE website optimization book for years to come.
Excellent and comprehensive August 23, 2008
I sometimes marvel at how much certain authors can pack into a few hundred pages. That's certainly the case here.
Up to now, when people asked me about doing better with their websites, I'd refer them to a small stack of books and a few more web resources to get them started. With this, I won't need to: everything they need to know is here in one place.
I liked that he uses real examples and isn't afraid of code. Too many books in this genre are either all code or ignore it entirely.
I thoroughly enjoyed this and will be recommending it to others.
Practical, detailed, and thorough August 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Andy has written a very thorough, very detailed, relentlessly practical book about how to make incremental changes to your website that you can measure and prove to improve its performance and (most importantly) to increase your effectiveness and profits from internet commerce.
This book is detail oriented and presents a very methodical approach towards web development as a path of continuous improvement, continuous measurement, and cumulative advantage from focusing on the precise details that matter. Andy is on top of his game and is sharing his techniques - a sure winner.
Slimming Down, Speeding Up, and Cashing In August 6, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Andy King scored a big hit in 2003 with his first book 'Speed Up Your Site'. It's a guide which still has its own live web site where you can analyse the effectiveness of your web pages. This latest magnum opus goes way beyond that in scope and depth.
It's a guide to maximising every aspect of a website and its performance.It's an amazingly practical manual, with page after page of ideas, suggestions, and strategies for getting your pages more widely known and read. On the whole, it's not too technical, and he supplies snippets of code only when necessary. All the tips are within the grasp of anyone who is used to running a web site, and along the way he explains the principles of search engine optimization (SEO) as well as briefing you on how SEs treat your site.
This is an up-to-date account of how search engines such as Yahoo and Google rank your pages and deal with search requests. He also presents real-life case studies in which he shows 'before and after' makeovers of professional sites. These are most instructive in that the 'before' pages look attractive and professional enough - until their underlying weaknesses are analysed and rectified. The improvements give what are claimed as up to fifty times more site visitors per day, and in the case of a cosmetic dentist the need to employ more staff and move to bigger offices in Philadelphia.
The first half of the book deals with search engine marketing optimization, which can be expensive as one enters the world of paid advertising. But the second concentrates on things which anyone can do and afford - making pages smaller, lighter, and faster by trimming off the surplus fat. In an age of faster and faster broadband connections, web users are simply not prepared to wait more than a couple of seconds for a page to appear - so you've got to make important pages lean and speedy:Web page optimization streamlines your content to maximise display speed. Fast display speed is the key to success with your website. It increases profits, decreases costs, and improves customer satisfaction (not to mention search engine rankings, accessibility, and maintainability).
All of these issues are dealt with in detail - and I particularly liked the fact that he was prepared to repeat some of the techniques when they occurred in different contexts. It's not always easy to grasp some of these technologies in one simple pass. Especially as - in the case of optimizing images - he explains no less than sixteen possibilities for cutting file size and speeding up downloads.He's also keen on the optimization of style sheets and shows an amazing variety of techniques for creating what he calls 'CSS Architecture'. Here too there are no less than ten strategies explained which offer cleaner, tighter, coding and the use of structural markup to beat browser peculiarities and rendering delays.
Most of his explanations are clearly articulated, but occasionally he lapses into less than elegant repetition and jargon, which could deter the inexperienced:
"By converting old-style nonsemantic markup into semantic markup, you can more easily target noncontiguous elements with descendant selectors."
Fortunately, this sort of thing only happens occasionally. There are some very nifty tricks for creating buttons and rollover techniques using style sheets, which saves the time to download a graphic files button, and thus once again speeds up page rendering.
He puts in two chapters on advanced web performance and optimizing JavaScipt and Ajax on your site which I have to admit went beyond my technical competence. But then it's back to terra firma with understanding the metrics of your site's performance - that is, knowing how to analyse the statistical data returned by website analysers such as Google's Analytics and WebTrends. I've never been able to understand before what page 'bounce rate' was until it was explained here - and I was astonished when I saw the results from some of my own pages!
As the search for more detailed information and for planning campaigns goes on - so the process becomes more like a science. There are graphs and formulae scattered around these pages to prove this. It's the same for Pay Per Click advertising (PPC). All I can say is that if you are in this league, Andy King is your friend, and his advice is here thick on the ground to help you.
Outstanding and definitive July 28, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Outstanding and definitive--sufficiently inspiring to get me to do a long-postponed optimization of my website. I love the way the author mixes quantified tidbits about reader behavior with practical marketing strategies. Must read if you do any of your own website optimization, or if you employ anyone to do it for you.
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