Understanding Seo: Building a Foundation for Long Term Success

by Melanie Mitchell

The web's more crowded than ever - and that means Search Engine Optimization is more critical than ever. All too often, SEO is viewed as a mysterious "black art" - but it doesn't need to be. In Understanding Building a Foundation for Long Term Success , leading practitioner Melanie Mitchell completely demystifies SEO, showing you how to grab value from "low hanging fruit," and start optimizing everything from pages, text, and keywords to images - even your page's underlying HTML code. Mitchell shows how to craft a strategy that reflects your specific goals for attracting qualified traffic. You'll learn how to go beyond mere rankings to measure everything from the quality of visitor engagement to sales conversions; how to structure sites that are friendlier to both searchers and search engines; how to earn the honest external links that search engine algorithms love; and a whole lot more. Along the way, Mitchell explains all the concepts and terms you need to understand, so you can do it yourself, or work successfully with SEO specialists. If you're responsible for attracting more and better web traffic, this is the simple, usable, up-to-date SEO introduction you've been looking for!

60 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 1, 2012

About the author

Melanie Mitchell is a professor of computer science at Portland State University. She has worked at the Santa Fe Institute and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her major work has been in the areas of analogical reasoning, complex systems, genetic algorithms and cellular automata, and her publications in those fields are frequently cited.

She received her PhD in 1990 from the University of Michigan under Douglas Hofstadter and John Holland, for which she developed the Copycat cognitive architecture. She is the author of "Analogy-Making as Perception", essentially a book about Copycat. She has also critiqued Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science and showed that genetic algorithms could find better solutions to the majority problem for one-dimensional cellular automata. She is the author of An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms, a widely known introductory book published by MIT Press in 1996. She is also author of Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press, 2009), which won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award.