mediajunk

I've finally finished my book on search engine optimization, which I?ve called Website Findability: How to Get Traffic from Google and Other Search Engines.

I got the idea to write a book on this subject around the end of last year, shortly after a spike in visitor traffic to this weblog. The surge in visitors was a result of a piece I'd written about Google's "Florida update". A lot of sites lost good positions in Google as a result of that update, and a lot of people posted anguished comments in response to my entry.

I helped some of the commenters out by giving tips as to how to improve their sites' positions. The more help I gave, the more questions I got -- soon I was inundated with emails!

Now, I normally provide search engine optimization services to corporate clients. But the people who were emailing me were Mom 'n' Pop businesses, who didn't have a budget for optimization. I wondered if there was a way I could help all these people and make a little money for myself.

That's when I decided to write a book, detailing everything I know about search optimization -- or website findability, as I call it.

I soon had a dilemma. Since my subject is a hot topic, and I'm a writer by "trade", I was confident that I could interest a commercial publisher. But even as I hacked out the first draft, changes in the search engine industry were rendering some of my text obsolete. How could I ever write a book that would still be relevant by the time it hit the shelves?

That's when I decided to fully embrace the web medium: I would publish the book myself, in PDF format, and commit to updating it every 6-8 weeks, so that the information would not go be out of date.

So my readers are happy. And, by cutting out the middleman, I'm happy.

What I really like about being the author of a search engine optimization book is that lets me help far more people with their websites than I could with my small business.

On the other hand, I might be creating a lot of competitors for myself -- since anyone who reads my book will know as much about search engine optimization as I do!