SEO is changing fast. Many activities are now becoming semantic-orientated and much of what search engine optimizers do is in the grey-area where internet marketers have been active in for years. So why this book and why now? Well, for one thing, because SEO is becoming widespread and necessary. The web is growing at an incredible pace with hundreds of thousands of new sites joining it each day.

As a result being found has become harder and being found on time has become next to impossible unless you know what you are doing. Just as an increase in population in the real world stretches resources to the limit and becomes a problem which needs to be managed so does the sudden leap in online site numbers become a challenge which has to be met.

In an ideal world when the Google search engine bot or the one from Yahoo! or BING, for that matter, hit your site they are supposed to crawl it all in microseconds and take the information they have collected back to the main search engine database to be indexed. Unfortunately this does not happen quite as smoothly as it should. Partly because the web is so large and bots in it do not function quite the way they are supposed to when set free from their moorings and partly because website coding itself has become a lot more complex than the good old plain vanilla HTML days, the indexing process is never sufficient to get your website where it should be.

What’s more, because if you’re legit in what you’re doing and work hard in delivering whatever product or service you deliver through your website, you are also likely to not have sufficient time to take care of all those seemingly unimportant, to you, details which go on to make good website SEO. Those who are competing against you however and may not be as legit as you are usually aware of those details and have the budget needed to help optimize their websites properly.

This leads to an imbalance which is not fair but is natural where the web’s complexity is concerned. Websites which perhaps do not add real value to the web get relegated to the lower pages of Google while those selling ring tones or advertising or spammy ads in an automated fashion tend to go higher than they deserve.

When the web first began, before there was even a hint of, let alone the capability of eCommerce, it was seen as the great equalizer. It was the kind of place where someone with passion, a good idea and a few thousand dollars could beat massive corporations whose $100,000 price-tag websites did little more than put sleekly produced corporate brochures on the web.

I still believe in that ideal. I believe that the web should be the great equalizer. I dislike the fact that deeper pockets somehow gain you a marketing advantage beyond that of the quality of what you sell. I detest the fact that more manpower or the right SEO team will get a website on Google’s first page ahead of someone trying to make ends meet through the web.

SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to the #1 page of Google is my answer to all this. Naturally I want it to do well, as a book, and naturally I want it to be bought, but above all, I really want it to help the balance. I wrote it, putting in it, all the knowledge and practical steps I would have liked to have had myself when I first stepped on the web and did not know what to do. As a search engine optimizer I had to think whether I wanted something which would make me look good, show off my in-depth knowledge of search engine algorithms and my understanding of search theory or did I want something which would, potentially, put me out of business.

I don’t think SEO will ever go out of business. The nature of it is fluid, the practises ever shifting and the cat-and-mouse game search engine optimizers and search engines are engaged in is going to last for quite some time. I don’t also care about looking good. So I wrote something which has real value, a book which will deliver on its promise provided you follow its advice.

I have tried to make it as simple as possible and as timeless as possible. The web is shifting and SEO is changing with it. I will, in time, update this book as necessary but I have, in this book, given you the process at the very heart of SEO. As such it will neither date nor need much updating and should it, you will, by having followed it, be aware of what’s changed and what needs to be different yourself.

So go out there, win your website’s SEO war and... thank you for taking the time to read this.

David Amerland is the author of the Search Engine Optimization book: SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google's #1 page published by New Line Publishing and available to buy from Amazon.com and any quality bookshop. The ebook version of the book is available for Amazon Kindle as well as  Mobipocket, smartphone and Sony eBook Reader formats and available to purchase from any quality ebook retailer. You can also purchase it directly from this website. He masterminds winning SEO strategies for complex online business and helps the average webmaster get their site to the position it deserves. David has been instrumental in taking websites to the top of Google's first page in a way that has kept them there year after year. If you would like David to work on one of your SEO projects drop us a line with your request.