A beginner’s resource: eBoot Camp: Proven Internet Marketing Techniques to Grow Your Business, May 17, 2010

By     Lisa Fahoury, CBC (West Orange, NJ USA) – See all my reviews
This review is from: eBoot Camp: Proven Internet Marketing Techniques to Grow Your Business (Hardcover)
Talk to most small business owners about search engine optimization in any great detail and their eyes usually begin to glaze over. But there’s still a gnawing recognition by most that they’ll eventually need to know more about SEO, because in coming years it will become essential to the success of their organizations.

Yes, every business needs a website these days, and the mechanics of launching a site are easier than ever. But delve a little deeper in terms of site marketing, and most entrepreneurs don’t know a title tag from a title fight. That’s why a book that can take the techno-babble of site marketing and turn it into easily understood concepts that anyone can grasp is incredibly valuable.

And that’s one reason Corey Perlman’s book, eBoot Camp: Proven Internet Marketing Techniques to Grow Your Business, should be on the shelf of every small business owner, entrepreneur, and marketing consultant.

Moving up the search engine rankings
One of the biggest obstacles to the non-techie crowd is the jargon used to explain many concepts. Not so in eBoot Camp.

Why? Because Perlman believes that it’s business owners, not web designers, who best know their customers and how to communicate with them while they surf the web. And this book is definitely written with the goal of empowering business owners to control their own websites.

Perlman takes concepts like keywords, title tags, and meta tags and briefly explains their purpose, using real pictures of Google search results and web pages to illustrate what these things are, or should be, doing for your web site. Getting ranked by the search engines requires a strategy, and that must come from the business owner or management team.

Simple, effective online marketing strategies
It’s one thing to get your site ranked, but to stay there – and more importantly to keep and attract customers – you have to give customers a reason to want to visit it. This is where some old-fashioned writing skill can come in handy.

Perlman explains how writing articles, press releases, and blogs, among other things, can help direct traffic to your site. By using these methods for giving information – and delivering true value – to potential customers, they become addicted to your content. This gains you a loyal following of readers who are interested in what you have to say and see you as the go-to resource in their area of interest.

What to do…and how to do it
eBoot Camp’s straightforward explanation of online marketing concepts is enhanced by several actionable recommendations.

For example, be creative in using uncommon words in your pay-per-click ads. Your ad will cost less, and you’ll get more bang for your buck.

Some other bits of wisdom to consider:

–    Creating a page title tag? Put a keyword-rich headline in front of your company name. The first few words carry more weight with search engines.
–    Uncover all the websites in Google, Yahoo and MSN that feature a link to your site by entering your URL at […].
–    Don’t be misled by the term “keyword.” Keywords can also be key phrases. Include commonly misspelled words as part of your keyword list to take advantage of searchers’ frequent errors.

Not only does eBoot Camp lay out clear steps to follow for various techniques, it also features abundant resources and tips for success at the end of each chapter.

While most of the books in the online marketing category tempt by telling what should be done, very little time is spent explaining how to do it or where to find the resources to do it. Perlman makes the “how to” a central part of each chapter and it lets would-be web marketers feel like the masters of their own — and hopefully highly ranked — web sites.