Hundred Dollar SEO

credit: mikeautry1

Last week when a copy of Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer showed up at my door I was excited and intrigued. What exactly do Bryan, Lisa and John have in store for the reader?

After reading both Call to Action and Waiting for Your Cat to Bark I was surprised to see a title that implied content that is technical and software driven; rather than the theoretical psychologically driven stuff from previous books. It turns out the title is a bit off center, but still largely true.

Calling Always Be Testing a complete guide to Website Optimizer is like calling a cookbook the complete guide to a Maytag oven. Yes, it does tell you what to use an oven for, but it is not the owners manual for the oven. I think this fact dawns on them; the bulk of the content follows a comfortable pattern.

• Questions to Ask
• Exercise
• What to Test
• Apply This to Your Site

Most of the book is about what to test and how to test, not how to use Website Optimizer. Much of the content and examples from FutureNow and previous books are revisited to create a methodology for testing. They call call it a testing framework throughout the book — you could easily call it a recipe.

The first couple chapters and the last section of the book do cover implementation of code and integration with WordPress. However, they do not cover integration of Website Optimizer with Google Analytics. Always Be Testing does a remarkable job of applying the information that FutureNow has been producing on the web and spends some time debunking the concept of best practices. They take a position that whatever you expect to work is probably wrong, regardless of who else it works for. I especially appreciate the section where they discuss Amazon taking actions on their checkout buttons that are generally known to decrease click through. You should read to find out why Amazon doesn’t want you to buy from the flagship store.

If you already understand the concepts of Persuasion Architecture this should be a swift read with plenty of valuable tips to improve how you test your websites and improve your approach to testing frameworks.