Search Engine Optimization, making your website attractive to search engines and hence drawing in as much traffic as possible, is seen by many as a black art. The search engines are understandably cagey about the methods they use to rank pages, and some website activities can unexpectedly drop your website from the rankings entirely.

There are many SEO organizations who will optimize your website for you – for a fee. But SEO should be an ongoing process, as your website and the search engines both evolve, and ongoing consultancy will soon burn a whole in your budget.

For those who want to learn enough about SEO to maintain their website’s popularity, Search Engine Optimization – An hour a day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin. This isn’t a structured course, whereby you learn SEO in an hour a day. Instead, the first section of the book explains the basic SEO principles, and guides you through discovering what your goals for your website are and what optimizations you need to make.

The second part of the book then guides you through designing your own SEO program – and it is this program that will then require a commitment from you of an hour a day to keep it running. Designing your program is, according to the book plan, a 3-month endeavor, made up of discrete tasks – some of which will be easier than others.

The final chapter of the book is entitled “Extra Credit and Guilt-Free Slacking” and contains extra tasks with those with the time and enthusiasm to go the extra mile, and a few shortcuts for those most pressed for time.

The book avoids “black hat” techniques that may currently work but will be worthless next time the search engines change their algorithms and may ultimately turn out to hurt your website’s credibility. The text is clear and well-written, and by the time you finish the book and put your SEO plan into action, you’ll be an SEO expert and your website will rock!