A while ago, Glenn Murray (aka DivineWrite) put out a call on Twitter looking for people to review his latest ebook, SEO Secrets.

Despite being hugely sceptical about the whole ebook genre (too many scammers charging for misleading or out of date information in that space, IMHO) I volunteered because I know that Glenn’s previous work is of a high quality and, as I follow him on delicious, I know he’s been doing a lot of very diligent research.

First Impressions

On downloading the PDF and opening my review copy for the first time I was struck by how nicely designed and well laid-out the book is. The title page matches the design of his website and the typography is unusally readable for a PDF. On to the coontents page to what topics it covers and... JEEZ! IT’S HUGE!. One hundred and ninety-nine pages long!

Sure, the layout uses plenty of whitespace and Glenn’s attention to detail means that he included a three-page introduction, glossary, bibliography and index but 199 pages makes for a long ebook.

The First Few Chapters

SEO is a very broad subject and Glenn has attempted to cover a lot of it. Experienced SEOs won’t gain any insight into cutting edge techniques or shady greyhat practices - this is a book for bloggers and web designers wanting to get to grips with the basics of search engine optimisation.

The first chapter explains what SEO means (I said it was for beginners) and why you would want to be aware of good practices in the art. After that, the next chapter covers keyword research and contains a number of good examples, often culled from divinewrite.com itself.

Glenn’s On-Page SEO Advice

Chapter three is a meaty one at thirty-four pages and covers the technical aspects of SEO, such as canonical URLs, duplicate content, semantic HTML and so on.

Everything presented here is solid, sensible advice - my experience is that if you follow these pointers, you’ll rank for keywords that aren’t too competitive. Glenn backs up his instructions with lots of links and examples making the book is all the more readable for it, if you want to dig deeper into a particular issue he provides some good pages to keep reading on the web.

Configuring Wordpress For SEO

The fourth chapter covers Glenn’s recipe for optimising a self-hosted Wordpress install and, again, it is good advice. I think, however, that this is the section of the book that will age fastest.

Wordpress is continually releasing new versions and its ecosystem of third-party plugins and themes is enormous. I think it is worth looking at the advice in the book and hunting around (or thinking laterally) for other ways to acheive similar ends. If every Wordpress blog installed the list of plugins in SEO Secrets, there would be no competitive advantage.

Chapter 5 - Submit Your Site(Map)

Nop surprises here: Glenn recommends submitting a sitemap to Google, Yahoo and Bing’s webmaster tools and to their Local Business Centres, where appropriate.

He also mentions the two remaining directories that have any search engine love - Yahoo and DMOZ. I personally don’t think that Yahoo directory is worth $200 per year, but your mileage may vary.

Create Great Content and Optimise It

This is DivineWrite’s core expertise - copywriting for SEO - and it shows in the next couple of chapters.

He starts with the oft repeated premise of create great content and people will link to it and then discusses in detail the types of posts that can act as linkbait (taking the 20 post types from Problogger’s book).

The next chapter builds on the keyword research from chapter one and discusses techniques to ensure that your articles are packed with good keywords whilst still keeping your text readable and feeling natural. This is good stuff, and something that I need to practice. I particularly like the use of wordclouds to illustrate keyword density.

After writing and optimising your content, the book then gives some pointers on creating a buzz around it with social media and some (very whitehat) linkbuilding strategies. I am not going to go into the details of the rest of the book - suffice to say it covers the full range of SEO basics.

Conclusion

I would recommend this ebook to those starting out in SEO. It is well-researched and informatively written and provides excellent value for money at $39.97 (USD). I know that Glenn put a lot of work into its production and it shows - this is not the typical twenty page, cut-and-paste ebook rip off.

If you are starting your first blog then a resource like this book will save you a lot of time trying to sift through misinformation and rubbish. The techniques presented here will work and provide a great foundation to your SEO campaign.

Want to get the download? Well, here it is.

If you want to check out the quality of Glenn’s work before you buy, here is his presentation on Content Creation For Search Engines: