It’s always difficult when a publisher sends you a free book. Bloggers are a fantastic investment for publishers, I’m sure. If I receive a book in the mail at no cost, I’m compelled to both read it and to decide whether or not to recommend it.
I recently received Content Rich: Writing Your Way to Wealth on the Web by Jon Wuebben. I could not wait to dive into this book and find some comprehensive reading on both improving my writing skills and understanding the nuances of how search engines analyze and rank text. In my humble opinion, the book came up short on both.
If you’re writing a book on any subject, I believe you’re telling the world that you’re unequivocally an expert in the field with accurate and detailed evidence to back it up. In this case, I think Jon Wuebben is knowledgeable of writing content and attracting search engines, but I found it startling that the book left out key methods for SEO Copywriting.
How Does Content Rich Rank?
One of the great things about seeing how great someone is at Search Engine Optimization is actually seeing where they rank in the Search Engines. It’s surprising to me that the Content Rich site isn’t actually first in the rankings for a search on the book! In fact, the blog appears and the book’s website isn’t even on the first page of results! If you do a search of SEO Copywriting, you won’t find it anywhere.
This is because the book’s web page isn’t even optimized! It’s very odd that a website touting Search Engine Optimized content (and stating it takes less effort than a blog) doesn’t actually have any optimized content! Much of the wording is actually within the image and not available for search engines to crawl.
Blogs Don’t Beat Websites?
In Figure 1-2, there’s a peculiar chart that displays a relationship where Website copy has more impact (bigger bubble) on search engines than blog copy does, and that blogs require more time/effort. The reason why that’s bizarre is that a blog page IS a web page. This makes it sound like we’re working with 2 different technologies but both are simply HTML. Both can be optimized, both can have impact. Even more notable is that the Content Rich Blog ranks better than his website!
If you own a website with 20 pages, you’ve got quite a bit of work to do to make that 20 pages work better than a blog that may have 1,800 pages. One great advantage of using a blog is that it naturally progresses into better and richer content for attracting visitors. In my opinion, this is done with little effort spread across time. The quantity of rich content that a blog supplies will far supersede the tweaking and tuning that a website requires to gain the same impact.
What’s Pagerank?
Now, a quote from the book:
Google’s “Pagerank” is the most well known page factor. If you aren’t aware of it, it’s the little horizontal bar on the Google Toolbar that displays a web page’s importance – shown by a strength indicator that ranks from 1-10.
What?! This sentence might lead someone to believe that, in order to have Pagerank, you need a toolbar. The toolbar is simply a means for a website to see what their pagerank is.
Pagerank is much more than a graph on a toolbar or a measure of importance as stated by the book. Pagerank is a complex algorithm, not just some random stamp of importance applied by Google. Pagerank is a measure of a page’s popularity as defined by other pages, which are weighted for their popularity.
Closing the Book
I tried to stick with the book, but now I was really curious and wanted to spot check other topics. I turned to the index where I wanted to find out about alt tags on images, titles in anchor tags, heading, and subheadings and how they might impact search results.
Nada, zip, zilch. The Complete SEO Copywriting Guide for Search Engine Rankings didn’t touch on any of these important topics in a level of detail that would help you write your way to wealth. It’s incomplete… not even mentioning some of these important elements of SEO Copywriting.
If you’d like a comparison and wish to take a look at a far more detailed analysis of search engines and how they rank content, I’d suggest SEOmoz and the Search Engine Ranking Factors. You’ll immediately see how many of the Top 10 search engine factors are totally missing from this book.
My advice: Skip this one, you’ll find much better resources for SEO Copywriting on the web.
Old school marketers always seem to get hung-up on the number of eyeballs. I’ve always been a database and direct marketer, so I liked getting the right eyeballs rather than pushing advertisements in front of all of them.
