The Art of SEO, 3rd Edition

Foreword

In 2004, when I did my first professional work in the field of search engine optimization, Google was estimated to receive ~200 million searches each day. In 2014, that number jumped to more than 6 billion, a 30x increase over 10 years. Since its inception, web search has been a powerful tool for people to find what they need, and as a result, it’s also been a powerful channel for those seeking to attract attention, traffic, actions, and customers. But in 2004, discovering how search engines worked and how to drive that traffic was a daunting challenge.

Web forums, blogs, and a handful of industry news sites were the first to take on the problem. They built communities and published resources to help both industry insiders and those aspiring to learn SEO. That’s where I first cut my teeth. But learning from those sources was hard work—and there were no alternatives. Schools didn’t teach SEO (the great majority of them still don’t!), online courses were extremely rare (and many were low quality or straight-up misleading), and there were almost no books on the subject.

When I founded the SEOmoz blog (which became the company known today as “Moz”), my mission was to educate and to learn by doing so. Nothing has made me a better student of SEO and of marketing than being forced to write about and teach it to others.

That’s why it was a great honor to have been one of the contributing writers for the original two editions of this book. When we finished that first full draft, ...