E-book review: 50 Kick-Ass Keyword Strategies

One of the many facets of WonderGroup is search engine optimization/keyword research. One of the blogs that has helped inundate me with information on SEO is the Wordtracker Academy, which emailed me earlier this week to promote a new e-book.

Check out 50 Kick-Ass Keyword Strategies here. Here's what I thought of it:

PROS
--> Very digestible-- each tip has its own clear, bulleted page with no additional fluff.

--> While much of the content is basic to SEO, many of the tips offer new perspectives and helpful tips.

--> The book provides a great list of free tools I hadn't used before.

--> The author, Aaron Wall, is great about keeping a conversational tone, and using anectdotes and examples to clarify his points.

CONS
--> It feels like no one even proofread this thing once. Words like "chuncks" (chunks) and "coveing" (covering) would have been caught with even a basic Spellcheck, and mistakes like "inking" (linking) and "forward" (toward) mean that no human took the time to scan the final product. This kind of thing drives me crazy. They even misspelled URLs they were making a case for ("competer.com" for compete.com). Sloppy.

--> The first thing that I did was print the book off so I could read it at my own pace, mark it up, pass it on, etc. While mostly this wasn't a problem-- the layout is really great for reading it on the printed page-- the book is heavy with hyperlinks. If the URLs had been spelled out instead, I could see this book being much more useful in the long-term. My printed version is much less useful than it could have been.

OVERALL
--> Worth the $27 we spent on it, because the content is the most important thing and there's a lot to be learned here.