August 14th, 2007
Web Marketing For Dummies – Reviewed
If you would like an introduction of how web marketing works and what are the strategies that you can employ to market your product or services online, you would definitely want to take a look at this newly released Dummies series – Web Marketing For Dummies by Jan Zimmerman
The first part of this book does not really touch on the marketing yet. Instead, it gives you the fundamentals of how to plan a site to prepare for the marketing phase. You will also learn how to create an online marketing plan and writing a Request For Proposal (RFP).
The next few chapters illustrates more clearly how can you proceed to build a marketing-effective site. There is a whole chapter that focus on how to create an effective store and improving your customers’ shopping experiences. I also find the techniques suggested by Jan useful when the author talks about pulling repeat visitors with onsite online marketing techniques. Methods such as generating fresh content, promoting community activities and getting awards are highly relevant to most sites.
Getting the Buzz
The main juice of this book lies in the third part where it talks about how to create a buzz with various methods and channels. n addition, it also dedicates an entire chapter on the art of E-mail marketing. You will be surprised that how much more we can do with emails 
This is not a Search Engine Optimization Book
Frankly, there are far more better books on Search Engine Optimization (search for Aaron Wall, Peter Kent etc). The Search Engine section in this book contains some misleading information although most part of the content is concrete.
The book states that:
A Google sitemap generates extra value, while badly structured sites might diminish PageRank.
This lead readers into believing that PageRank is related to Google sitemap, which in actual fact, its not. PageRank is purely based on the quality of incoming links to a page. Google explains PageRank here.
Links from .edu, .gov, and .org Web sites appear to generate extra value.
Links from these pages will not generate extra value. An engineer from Google, Matt Cutts has clarified this doubt sometime ago. You can see his video here. For instance, if you receive a link from a newly set up .gov site, it does not generate higher value to your site compared to a newly set up .com site.
To conclude, this is a good book to start off and learn about web marketing but not Search Engine Optimization. The author has also included some excellent resources to help the beginners to kick start. Highly recommended for most Webmasters 
Popularity: 4% [?]
