Honest SEO: Demystifying the Google Algorithm to Help You Get More Traffic & Revenue
Jason Hennessey
An Inc. Ofiginal (2023)

Is your website a thriving marketplace or a mausoleum? How do you know?

As Jason Hennessey explains, “Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of ongoing practices designed to improve the appearance and position of web pages in organic search results. It is the process of continuously improving your site’s organic rankings on search engines such as Google, YouTube, Amazon, and Bing. In practice, SEO typically involves creating high-quality content, monitoring your site’s technical health, building links from other sites, making sure your site loads quickly, and providing a good user experience by making your site easy to use and navigate.”

At least since the ancient markets in the Middle East, the primary function of marketing has been to create or increase demand for the given offering.  After the invention of the world wide web in 1993, attributed to Tim Berners-Lee, marketing has had increasingly wider and deeper opportunities to serve that function.

In Honest SEO, Hennessey explains HOW TO

o Understand SEO fundamentals
o Design and engineer a website’s blueprint and architecture
o Recruit a digital marketing team and hold them accountable
o Measure the success of SEO efforts
o Generate new business that creates stronger SEO
o Create a targeted content strategy
o Apply advanced CEO techniques to your website

These are among the hundreds of passages that caught my eye:

o A Proven Strategy for Becoming User-Friendly (Pages 15-22)
o The Three Main Components of SEO (39-43)
o Creating the Blueprint for Your Overall Web Strategy (53-58)
o Key Roles on a Digital Marketing Team (73-80)
o Content Strategy (109-115)

o Avoiding Google Jail (133)
o Link Building Takes Real Work (134-141)
o Becoming Remarkable (156-163)
o Step-by-Step Technical Audit (180-183)
o How to Convert Traffic to Profit (225-233)

Also, be sure to pay special attention to the set of “Tips and Takeaways” at the end of each chapter.

If you are checking out Honest SEO, presumably you have a strong interest in learning how to generate increasingly greater sales and profits from whatever your organization offers online. You can hire people and/or retain a firm to do that or you can read this book. Whatever you decide to do, your organization must optimize its website to increase its traffic and get in front of more of its targeted customers at the precise time they are looking for it.  The material in Honest SEO provides an abundance of information, insights, and counsel that can provide a thorough orientation in digital marketing. If there is a better source than Jason Hennessey and his book,  I would certainly like to know about it ASAP.

Here are two concluding suggestions: While reading Honest SEO, I urge you to highlight key passages, and, record your comments, questions, action steps (preferably with deadlines) and page references as well as your responses to questions posed throughout the narrative and to lessons you have learned.  These two simple tactics will facilitate, indeed expedite frequent reviews of key material later.