Need help with your SEO? I do quick screen-share sessions with business owners; we get on the phone, share our screens, and review your site and your competitors’. I can tell you what you need to do to rank higher than your competitors, how to do it, and if necessary how to find someone reliable to do it for you. The most common reaction I get after a one- or two-hour session is, “Wow, we’ve got a lot of work to do!” A little knowledge goes a long way…I can save you thousands of dollars and months of work by pointing you in the right direction. See here for more SEO consulting information.

I’ve been writing SEO for Dummies since 2003 (it was Search Engine Optimization for Dummies through the 5th edition, after which the publisher decided everyone who wanted to know about search engine optimization knew the acronym SEO). The 2020 Edition, SEO for Dummies, 7th Edition, is now available.

So, if you’re looking for information about a previous edition of SEO for Dummies, please click here. For information on the 7th Edition, read on. You’ll find information about special discounts on SEO tools, some useful additional information, and links from the chapters.

  • Special Discounts on Tools
  • Article: Search Techniques You Should Know
  • Article: Staying Out of Copyright Jail This is on the Dummies.com site. It is a little old, but that isn’t a problem for most of the content; the one significant change is that although the article says works copyrighted before 1922 are automatically in the public domain, it is now works copyrighted before January 1st, 1924. Copyright is a complicated issue, but you can find flowcharts and tables that try to simplify it (and manage to do so to a limited degree); see here, for instance.
  • Article: How to Pick an SEO Firm (Without Getting Burned!)
  • Article: Paying Per Click This article is pretty old, from a previous edition of Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, so it’s not something you should rely on for managing a campaign, but it does give a quick overview of how PPC advertising works.
  • Article: Grab More Page One Listings Using this Sneaky Technique Well, this is embarrassing; while writing the book I’d planned to post this article on the Web site, and said so in a couple of places in the book. However, during writing it actually ended up in the book. See Chapter 23 for a discussion of different ways to grab more real estate on the search results page, and in particular page 412.

Links in Chapters

Here are the links that are found in the printed book.

Part I: Search Engine Basics

Chapter 1: Surveying the Search Engine Landscape

Chapter 2: Search Results, Deconstructed

Chapter 3: Your One-Hour, Search-Engine-Friendly Web Site Makeover

Chapter 4: Beating the Competition–Planning a Powerful Search-Engine Strategy

Chapter 5: Making Your Site Useful and Visible

Part II: Building Search-Engine Friendly Sites

Chapter 6: Picking Powerful Keywords

Chapter 7: Creating Pages that Search Engines Love

Chapter 8: Designing for Speed

Chapter 9: Designing for Mobile

Chapter 10: Using Structured Data Markup

Chapter 11: Avoiding Things that Search Engines Hate

Chapter 12: Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap

Chapter 13: Bulking Up Your Site—Competing with Content

Chapter 14: Finding Traffic Through Local-Search Marketing

Part III: Adding Your Site to the Indexes & Directories

Chapter 15: Getting Your Pages into the Search Engines

Chapter 16: Submitting to the Directories

Chapter 17: Product Search—Remember the Shopping Directories and Retailers

Part IV: After You’ve Submitted Your Site

Chapter 18: Using Link Popularity to Boost Your Position

Chapter 19: Finding Sites to Link to Yours

Chapter 20: Even More Great Places to Get Links

Chapter 21: Social Networking—Driven by Drivel

Chapter 22: Video & Images—Putting Your Best Face Forward

Chapter 23: Beyond the Basics

Chapter 24: When Google Bites Back—A Guide to Catastrophe

Part V: Parts of Tens

Chapter 25: Ten Plus Myths and Mistakes

  • PeterKentConsulting: SEO for Dummies 7th Edition, by Peter Kent

Chapter 26: Ten Plus Ways to Stay Updated

Chapter 27: Ten-Plus Useful Things to Know